It seems that a lot of folk have wildly different experiences on wild variety of browsers and hardware. I use Mullvad VPN and I think their new DNS blockers seem to eradicate advertisements even on Spotify Free. I also don't think Google made the adblock rollout global, but did if for whatever subsections of the network. Looks like they've backed off for now, even, no doubt a time out to calibrate the evil cheater detecting algos...