Ironically, the FB opt-in approach from the article is more privacy-forward than the publisher's automatically implied consent...

This is not gdpr compliant, it's just the old cookie EU consent.

The entire text-media industry has been transformed by Facebook and Google into this state. Anything that used to be a newspaper is now a DFP content-farm with all the shitty third-party js they can manage to cram in there. Sites with paid subscriptions seem just as bad on the inside.

The only other business model I’ve seen work is “be owned by a billionaire”.

You are confusing the writer of the article with the newspaper management. The writer can very well have a valid point while the newspaper management sees things differently. In fact, the writer may very well make this point because the newspaper management sees differently and yet, the article is published.