Honestly, if a site doesn't make it convenient for me to reject their bullshit, I'm happy to look elsewhere, there's very little information nowadays you can't find on at least a couple of sites, and for anything else, there are communities to ask.
And you're probably right - I don't really trust that my selections are respected (both on individual sites and on my browser), and often wonder if it's just an illusion of choice more than anything else, but I'd still rather have it than not.
My plan is to eventually set up a pi-hole and be done with much of this noise, but I've decided it'll have to wait for when I upgrade to a new machine which I hope to set up much better than this one lol