What laws are you talking about? The Internet has grown a lot that’s largely because we have smart politicians and strong institutions. I really think the regulation of the Internet has been amazingly good.
But also, the people with unsubscribe links now but not in 2002 would still commonly send their messages from a consistent address, making it easy to block them if you wanted to, and making even primitive spam filters highly effective against them. Meanwhile the people who randomize their from address to prevent this are the people who still don't have a functioning unsubscribe link.