It's the websites themselves that make the experience worse. Nobody forced them to have cookie pop up banners. GDPR simply forced them to be upfront about what they're doing and get permission - and they chose to be in your face and dark-pattern about it.
The "web experience" was infinitely better before ads and tracking infested everything.
> When was this mythical time the web wasn’t ad ridden?
Seems like ages ago. Webrings and link directories. Every page was hand-made by a passionate human, for other passionate humans, about subjects they cared about.
Now it's 99.99% ads, tracking, engagement, spam, link farms, generated garbage, outrage, and now AI nonsense.
There's so little to bookmark (i.e. care about) that browsers dropped support for bookmarks. Just think about that. No place worth remembering nor revisiting anymore.
I can't say exactly when I first noticed how pervasive and intrusive web advertising was getting but it was at least 10 years after I started using the web regularly (~1994).
I have some issues with GDPR implementation but this is just straight-up disconnected from reality; GDPR is relatively popular in Europe. If anything, most stats that I've seen suggest that Europeans generally want privacy laws to go further.
The "web experience" was infinitely better before ads and tracking infested everything.