>There is no societal expectation around what I do with those bytes
Yes, there is. If you had a group of 100 people and asked what google.com should look like and showed them how Chrome renders the page and your 80x24 modification does that all 100 would say that yours is not expected. You are still too hung up on these technical details of how things are implemented than how the average person thinks of these things.
A consensus answer to "what should google.com look like?" does not suggest or imply any sort of "social contract".
There is not, and has never been, a social contract that says I have to look at the ads served with any website. If you think there is, then I'm sorry, but you're sorely mistaken.
Similarly, there is no social contract that says I have to watch commercials while I'm watching TV (not that I've watched linear TV in over a decade, but...). I can mute it, change the channel, go to the bathroom, whatever. If you think there is, then I'm not sure what to tell you; your opinions on this are so outside the mainstream that we're not going to see eye-to-eye on this.
My browser already automatically mutes video ads on my behalf. And an ad blocker effectively "clicks the X button" for me. Sometimes I don't even scroll down far enough to see an ad. How is one of those activities breaking the social contract and others not? Or are they all breaking the social contract? Or none of them? I have no idea because I don't know who's defining the terms of this social contract.
Yes, there is. If you had a group of 100 people and asked what google.com should look like and showed them how Chrome renders the page and your 80x24 modification does that all 100 would say that yours is not expected. You are still too hung up on these technical details of how things are implemented than how the average person thinks of these things.