I think there's an argument to be made that GDPR had some effects. For example, you can now enable or disable ads personalization on Google at https://adssettings.google.com. I don't think that was there before GDPR. Google also presumably did explicit opt-in for EU users, since otherwise they'd have already faced some pretty massive fines.

It may be that most users consented, but I think the take away from that should be that most users do not consider ads personalization a significant violation of their privacy.