I think now is a great time to remind everyone, like sync’s developer, Lemmy’s developers need to be paid too! The amount of time all the devs put into making lemmy exist, in my opinion, should be worth some of your money. If you can afford it, donating to the people who develop lemmy and/or the people keeping your home instance up will accelerate the incredible growth of lemmy!
I am in the similar boat. I feel that I left reddit in solidarity with the 3rd party app developers. And, I was expecting the price to reflect some discount for the people who left in solidarity.
I also feel that ad removal is a in principle as most people on lemmy would be using tools to already block ads. I am willing to pay, but I am hardly inconvenienced by the ads.