Which is often immediately followed by a pop-up asking me to subscribe to get email updates. Curiously this prompt seems to occur before you've had time to read the first sentence of content.

Yes, it's pretty stupid. I don't know why anyone would subscribe to a newsletter before even knowing what it's about, they should do it once you've read the entire article.

While the prompt is annoying the true culprit of ruining the web experience are websites trying to gather as much data as possible

which is due to the centralised framework which incentivises the web now.

I have uBlock filters to bin off these cookie popups, I'm amazed those irritating things ever became law without someone pointing out how completely futile alarm fatigue makes them.

Now if the GDPR could realistically do something about the tidal wave of spam I've got from pubs in random parts of England and Wales I happened to visit once while waiting for a train back when they were insisting on doing everything through an app that would be nice! I'm fairly sure most apps don't need to be apps at all, they could be websites if companies weren't desperate to inject analytics and yet another vector for spammy marketing into every interaction with them.