To summarize the summary of a summary: people are a problem.

Tom Scott offers a brief explanation of how the Interwebs got to be such a mess.

Of note: European regulations forbid any sort of tracking of users without consent.  Ergo, any site, including all those sites that serve up all the annoying embedded ads, that wants to track users, has to pop up a notice asking permission.

What I didn't hear him note is this:  What happens if you don't consent to tracking?  Why, the site in question can't remember anything about you... including the fact that you don't consent to tracking.  So it has to ask again on the next page load, and the next, and so on until you do consent.  Or install an adblocker, turn off JawaScript, etc.