Trivial answer: the webpage is a monolithic PNG. Good luck building a general-purpose image parser & modifier, especially on a webpage with embedded animations.
There are ways to make it very difficult to distinguish between content and ads, that's all you need to do. At the highest level, the content is the ads, which is usually what ends up happening to trade publications anyway.
A monolithic PNG wouldn't have annoying animated ads or videos that push down content, they wouldn't pop over. They wouldn't be serving malware since it would come from wired. I would miss the ability to select text, but I wouldn't be bothered by the ads anymore.
Maybe now if they served a canvas element, and put all the content in that with animated ads, that would be more bothersome.
This might happen. But I can tell you there will be some very vocal opposition to this (users of screen readers for instance, and anybody living in a country with accessibility laws will be very happy to give you merry hell).
As everyone else has said, I would prefer that (if I were browsing with no filtering).
Here's the trivial client blocking method: OCR and break the result into different groups by page location, font size and color; the article will be the largest groups of text with the same font. Large images and charts that were part of the original article would be cropped out and re-inserted into the final document. Within a few days you would see a browser extension made with adaptable filtering for most sites that used the monolithic PNG.
I always wondered why didn't youtube concatenate the ad content directly to the main content stream. It should be possible without reencoding and maybe a minimal muxing overhead (hell DASH is not even multiplexed). It would be quite hard to block that.
If somebody did that monolithic PNG a bunch of hackers would see it as a challenge and there would be a "Show HN: how to get around wireds new png system" within a week.
There are ways to make it very difficult to distinguish between content and ads, that's all you need to do. At the highest level, the content is the ads, which is usually what ends up happening to trade publications anyway.