Yes but that's only one tiny aspect of GDPR. Unfortunately this is an aspect where they caved in to corporate lobbying, they should have just mandated the obedience of the "do not track" flag (or a similar thing). That browsers set it by default is not a problem because the whole idea of GDPR is that tracking should be opt-in, not opt-out. But really this is a tiny part of GDPR. It is not just about the web even. And as annoying as the cookiewalls are, they also make the user more aware (I mean, why do you want permission to share my data with 572 "trusted partners"??). It also enforced some concepts that should already have been standard, like the purpose principle, explicit permission ("opt-in") etc.

It has really made companies much more aware of data handling. At work we have data protection officers now, privacy advocates, every app we onboard now has to be reviewed in terms of what the data is used for, where it ends up, if we have agreements with them in terms of what it's used for etc. This is really great because before we had pretty much nothing like that. It was just move fast and break things, including customers' privacy that would get broken. And our company is one that doesn't make any money from tracking our customers, so it wasn't really targeted as us, but it still drove so much improvement.

I think it will become much better now that we are disconnecting europe from US services. The main reason that tracking-informed ads are so much more valuable than context-informed ads, is that Google and Meta etc are promoting them. They control the auctions, and tracking is their moat. Nobody has such pervasive tracking networks as them.

The disconnection from these services could really be the trigger for an EU-based context-informed advertising service.