Back in the old days you paid for a cable subscription and got to watch ads every 15 minutes

Oh, hell no. We had HBO my entire teen years, and that was the huge difference between cable and broadcast - there were no commercials on HBO.

I never had cable as an adult; I didn't like being beholden to someone else's tastes and show times, so we just rented videos: Blockbuster, or more often the locally owned rental place - they had weirder stuff.

When Cable became "infinite channels," they did start showing ads, but that wasn't paying for content: that was paying for delivery. It was supersized broadcast TV. To emphasize this, packages cost extra, and those special, extra channels (HBO, etc) didn't have commercials. The basic package was just extra broadcast TV.

Netflix is more analogous to HBO than cable. Supporting this is their original operating model: a subscription fee that got you DVDs mailed to your house. Just like a subscription fee to Blockbuster that got you a certain number of rentals per month.

Don't try to normalize it by claiming "it's always been this way," because it hasn't.

television was designed around the advertising break

Television was free. Netflix was originally movies. Movies don't have ads (not specific, non-story related ones, anyway; they've always had product placement). It's been only relatively recently that Netflix has gotten into the episodic game, which is even less justification for ad breaks, because episodes are shorter than movies. Which have no ads.

You're entitled to pay for what you like and be happy with it, buy fuck if I'm going to pay someone to watch their ads. If I was a TV watcher, I'd pay for choice - a thousand channels, with ad-ridden content. I draw the line at going to a movie theater, paying for a ticket, and then having the movie interrupted with ads, which is what this is equivalent to. You can always skip the ones up front with timing, and fuck those ads too.