“It was a bug” is the common excuse when an intentional feature backfires.
Loading screen ads seem like an obvious next step of enshittification. They are creeping back into video with ads breaks on streaming, only a matter of time before they are in games too.
Loading screens got shorter as tech improved. Now tech is too fast for proper ads so I bet there's going to be intentional delay time added in the future for more ad impressions.
The pop up may have been triggered by a technical glitch before they wanted it to. But the whole feature of course was not only developed but implemented into the live version of the game.
That excuse only works for people who have no ideas how programming works. New features can't appear because of a glitch.
The only thing that can indeed happen is the feature was developed and tested, and it was enabled by a glitch. But the feature necessarily was developed intentionally, because things don't just appear like that in a program.
"One of our engineers tripped and fell on the keyboard and accidentally coded an entire ad delivery system then accidentally shipped it."
The only way I could imagine this being an accident was if they'd already built the ad system and then decided not to use it because they had a burst of common sense at the last possible minute, then later on they accidentally shipped the wrong version in an update.
Ads don't appear in computer programs by magic or by accident. Even if its was a "glitch" you can be sure there's a reason why the user experience code has the ability to display ads.
If you like Ubisoft games, it's time to find some new favourites elsewhere.