I already donate to my Mastodon instance, if my instance needs or wants money for any reason, they should set up a donation button and I’ll subscribe. Which will give them a lot more money than they would ever make from showing me ads. We should normalize removing all ads from the internet, forever.
I use a physical sim. I’m not sure it even supports eSIM, but I’d be hesitant to ditch the physical sim for precisely the reasons you mentioned. I’ve swapped sims around between phones and even borrowed them from people when I was in a new area, something that’s much harder with eSIMs.
I donate to all the services I use. Including my Mastodon instance, Wikipedia, Habitica, etc…
EDIT: And I mean monthly. Except for Wikipedia where it’s just yearly.
I think it comes down to just knowing what is good. When you’re young you don’t have any experience to judge quality by. As you get older you can rapidly assess that something sucks, even if other people are pumping it up. Either in terms of gameplay or plot or whatever, now you have standards. Also, a lot of modern games just don’t respect your time, and as you get older you realize your time is valuable so you just don’t have the patience for that.
I’m in my 30s, I still game, but I’m a lot quicker to just go “this sucks” and move on to something else.