Personally, yes. I think most of what the GDPR intended to accomplish could have been accomplished more easily by public education campaigns and broad cultural adoption of no-track plugins. That would have done a lot less damage to the user experience than naively assuming that if one pushed the educational burden onto sites, the sites would cease to do the tracking that triggered the educational burden rather than just bother their users forever with government-mandated information placards.
Especially given that what constituted "tracking" was so broad that a lot of sites took the "better safe than sorry" approach because it was cheaper than a full audit of their tracking and a lawyer to interpret whether, say, Apache logs that show IP address constitute "tracking."