Comment by SpecialistK

Why is blaming the lawmakers, the only ones who can enact laws governing this, "bad faith"? Bad faith does not mean a decision or opinion you disagree with.

Do Not Track was ignored because there was no legal requirement to. Wikipedia is not the best source, I know, but its first sentence on the "Adoption" section is: "Very few advertising companies actually supported DNT, due to a lack of regulatory or voluntary requirements for its use"

Lack of regulatory requirements. In other words, no government had the smarts or the spine to make it a law. Who is to blame for making the law...? Lawmakers.

"that's on you" is also an absolute cop-out, in my opinion. Lots of things on the internet are illegal, usually for good reason. I don't think I need to list examples. The EU, EU member-states, and other jurisdictions have no problem making horrendous things on the web illegal to host or visit. If data harvesting is bad, explicitly make it illegal.

"The average user would notice he's being tracked" also is the counter-argument to my point - if every site, no matter how banal, has a bar at the bottom with a big blue button that effectively says "yeah whatever go away" then it's ignored. Boy who cried wolf. If this bar only showed up on Meta and Google and Doubleclick ads then maybe it would carry some weight.

I didn't think it was necessary to say, but apparently it is: my criticism of this part of the GDPR is not to invalidate the good work it has done for user rights on the web. Only to note that regulations, no matter how well intentioned (the point of the OP), come with side-effects that were unseen at the time. Don't waste keystrokes defending those unfortunate side effects (while apparently blaming everyone except those with the power to change it) but instead form campaigns and working groups to propose something better and encourage your legislators to adopt it.