>Fwiw, class actions of this type have been popular mostly in one country and only since the sixties.
I presume you're speaking of the US, but just a month ago (went into effect June 25th) the EU opened up and simplified their class action scheme ('Directive on Representative Actions') to make it simpler and easier to file class action suits and largely remove borders and jurisdiction squabbles from the discussion. This US style system was set up specifically because it better protects consumers.
Quoting from the EU themselves:
>However, the consumers affected may feel powerless and hesitate to take legal actions. They might be confronted to obstacles such as the uncertainty about their rights or about which procedural mechanisms are available, psychological reluctance to take action or the negative balance of the expected costs relative to the benefits of the individual action. Collective redress mechanisms, such as the one provided by Directive (EU) 2020/1828 are therefore needed to overcome the obstacles faced by consumers in individual actions.
https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/consumer-protecti...
It's not really the set of people who are entitled to participate in this class action but are unaware of it that is relevant here. The relevant set is the subset of that group that would choose not to be in this settlement and also would individually sue Facebook over the legal issues and factual allegations involved in the class action.
I would expect that most people who are sufficiently concerned over the Facebook activities involved in this class action to actually individually sue would have already done so or at least started preparing to do so long ago and as part of that would have kept track of other lawsuits that overlapped with theirs.
Do you have a good reason to believe that we can consider negligible the proportion of people who are entitled to participate in this class action but are not aware of its existence and their rights and responsibilities? Can you show that it's probable that they're not in the majority?
The problem may be thorny, but you haven't made a convincing argument that this solution is decent. The law (in some countries more than others) is full of unsatisfying compromise, and not for lack of good ideas.
Fwiw, class actions of this type have been popular mostly in one country and only since the sixties. I agree that it's the status quo and people aren't rioting over it, but that's hardly the consensus of hundreds of years of jurisprudence.