You remember incorrectly. Right from the beginning, DNT was a useless “evil bit” that everyone was going to either ignore or obey only as long as it was used exclusively by a tiny fraction of sufficiently-technically savvy users. As soon as Microsoft announced it was turning DNT on for everyone, the game was up, and the people pushing it tried to distract attention from the fact that this kind of self-regulation never works by shooting the messenger, even though users’ clear preference is to have blocking protection on by default.