Do You Ever See Any ROI for Driving Paid Ads to Build an Email List?

Do you ever see any ROI or any case to be made for driving paid ads just to build an email list without a purchase at the end of it? Is that something that nowadays can work without a massive budget, a budget that maybe an individual site owner could come forward with? And if so, what kind of budget would someone take or is it even realistic? I think it depends on the niche. But I think for the most part, everyone in this day and age, unless you really just want it, there's a couple of use cases where that would make sense for me.