I disagree; extrapolating the Pareto principle and arbitrarily defining needs/wants ratio on privacy, by drawing a relation between either being savvy or ambivalent and justifying the value of free content, is a non-sequitur. There are absolutely no excuses for any of these ultra shady practices to exist and equally, had the incumbents been stopped from weaponising and/or deploying their aggressive and insidious plans in the first instance, it would have dissuaded others to use their platform for similar purposes.

These practices are going to take an even more twisted turn with deep-nudes/fakes, GPT2 etc. and related trends. If we are to learn from our experiences, it is now important to fight and push back, rather than just roll-over and pretend to be dead or to accept current practices and seek a (non-existent) compromise, as you suggest.