The surprise is that apparently 28 percent of "experienced programmers" don't have an ad blocker. I'm not sure how they got the data, but I wonder if their methods are up to the task of sorting out any possible inverse correlation between blocking ads and being willing to respond to polls.
There's a surprising amount of programmers that don't know basics of various parts of an operating system. I know people that know several languages, but get lost on installing a mod pack for a game or installing an app from within another app like a browser.
"experienced programmers" in would have web developers fall under that umbrella, I'd guess web developers are less likely to adopt adblockers if their livelihood depends on them
The engineer who sat next to me at my old job didn't use an adblocker. She also would just ignore anything on the screen that wasn't directly related to her task. There'd be "please update" OS popups or "do you want to install a plugin for markdown?" ide prompts on her screen for days. When I'd roll over to work on something at her desk I'd be like "how do you work like this?" she was like "like what?"
She was pretty good at engineering and generally smart. I don't know how she did it.
20 years pro experience here: I run several different browsers in various states of blockedness for various reasons. But when I'm off the clock, of course, it's firefox with ublock.