Maybe, but by being a paying customer with lots of options (including collective negotiation), you have a lot more leverage to get them to do what you want.
Sure. When they charge a reasonable price for occasional visitors, not the "just the price of a Starbucks coffee per month" subscription that's the SaaS wet dream.
Edit: also, non targeted NON INTRUSIVE ads will do too. Or would have done. If the ad industry wouldn't have burned any shred of credibility they ever had.
That's a pretty good point. If you want to be critical of the cookie/GDPR popup that's really the route to take. HN, Wikipedia and Github doesn't have any of this non-sense, because they have no incentive to track their users.
I do question the incentive of a number of sites. Reddit technically don't need to track you, they know all they need to based on which subreddit you're currently on. It's mainly sites that have no context to your activities that really need the tracking to attempt to provide ads that makes sense. Maybe having these sites should be financed differently?