Ah yes, the "internet we want", where Ad geniuses will spam you for the same thing you just bought off Amazon and mobile sites turning your phone into a hand warmer with all the ad crap they have to load and all the 3rd party cookies they add
And yet, before GDPR, when all of this was happening, those sites still saw increase in visitors and still made money, because people learned to ignore the ads since the design of the core website was pretty good and ads were not obtrusive to user experience.
And yet, before the FDA was allowed to regulate baby food, baby food producers in the US saw increase in buyers and still made money with their product with arsonic and lead content above dangerous threeshold for adults.
Those new regulation will probably increase the price of baby food, and people obvisouly didn't care about the heavy metal content, so why regulate at all?
I'd say "way before GDPR" we had a local maximum with the initial AdWords experience, where those ads were pretty unobtrusive and there was limited .js spam
"They still made money" sure, on top of externalities.
And now they realize, with some help from Apple and Chrome that this business model has a limit
