For your use case, acceptable ads definitely doesn't fit but a lot of people justify what they're doing as not-unethical (getting content without compensating creators) by saying that they're only protecting themselves from abusive ads, and blocking all ads is basically the only way to do this.

For these people, your malware example falls flat. A more accurate example would be a firewall whitelisting known non-malware software. At least in theory, that's how the acceptable ads feature works.