[the_other]

> Is there something that we gained to make me feel better next time I am annoyed with all the popups?

Hopefully you'll choose not to use those sites.

For the first couple of months, I clicked all the "manage my choices" buttons. I felt the pain, but decided it was worth it. Then I discovered that for many sites, I would have had to enable 3rd party cookies in order for the choices to stick. That made me realise that I simply didn't want the marketers to even know that I didn't want them to track me; that I didn't want to enable the malpractice of companies that hadn't offered me the choice to disable their options; that I wasn't prepared to rely on the devs behind those dialogs to implement the design implied.

So now, I just close the tab and read something else. My hope is that others make similar choices.