This tracking absolutely has impacted the average person. Have you noticed how addictive the social media algorithms are today? Pretty much everyone I know struggles to get off their recommended or "for you" tab at this point. It literally is rooted in tracking how long you spend on each piece of media, rewarding and delaying that reward based on what will hook you the most. If you start disabling tracking and anonymizing your browser, it suddenly all becomes really clear how unnecessary the content really is...