> In the process, they have surrendered their ad budgets to a "black box" process that they have no insight into or control over and can be easily manipulated against them.

No we were slowly forced by Google to surrender to their algorithm that use tons of data on users.

I wish it was still easy to just put an ad for car when people search « cheap car », but the reality is that they keep removing features, making things convoluted and on the other hand push hard for their automated algorithm.