It was meaningless from the beginning: DNT was always nothing but an Evil Bit. You’re getting mad at Microsoft for pointing out that the emperor had no clothes.
Is it? The whole point to this thread is that none of the big players stood by their "promises" for longer than a few months. Especially Google's hypocrisy of promoting DNT in Chrome and knowing full well their adtech teams would ignore it as soon as they had an excuse. (Microsoft and Mozilla enabling it by default sure was a "good" excuse, despite that obviously being the best interest of the users.)
It's possible they were looking for an excuse and lying. But enabling it by default definitely seemed to defeat the entire point of the fragile agreement. It doesn't matter to them whether it's better for users.
My entire point is that if it was a "fragile agreement" it wasn't in good faith and it was lying and waiting for any excuse to break it, by definition. It doesn't matter what excuse broke it. It was always a bad faith attempt to score some regulatory points and it was never about actually doing good for users. They never should have offered a "standard" for such a "fragile agreement" they didn't really believe in, and everything they said about it was hypocrisy.
I haven't seen any particularly compelling evidence it wasn't in good faith.
It was an "attempt to score some regulatory points and it was never about actually doing good for users". But that was always obvious because it was companies doing it.
It still would have done good if it was implemented.