I agree with the incentive of making it harder, and I do the same myself. However there's a balance to be found between making it harder for a third party and taking advantage of the tools.
If the third party gets the same information etiher way, then there is little to no harm in logging in to the service and taking advantage of the features available.
Not sure about all the accounts and strikes and things. Personally, I've been using uBlock Origin - but I also use uMatrix, which is something of a deprecated browser extension by the same author. However, I find that uMatrix really provides the granular control I want. Many websites I visit are broken from the outset, and then I switch things on little by little until I find the bare minimum required to make the site function for my needs.
Unfortunately, when it comes to Google, the minimum connection is often basically the same as logging in. However the global rules I have set in uMatrix lets me readily see which services require me to connect to Google servers to log in, while blocking them initially and giving me the option to pass on viewing the website if I don't feel like turning things on.
Yeah, see I'm not saying that the article isn't pointing in the right direction, rather that it is generally wrong in its assertions. In doing so, it is actually causing harm by discrediting objective truth with a narrative filled with flawed hyperbole.
It's long been a thing that "all the ice is going to melt in 30 years" - for the past 100 years that's been the best estimate scientists could make. Now, it's actually happening, and scientists are scrambling to make better predictions - but they do so with a solid understanding of the previous predictions.
However this article does disservice to that effort, because it's just stretching the previous hyperbole as far as it can with the goal of attracting viewership, rather than with the goal of spreading news in the hope that people will be better educated to make better decisions as a society, and as a species.
Any scientist worth their salt wouldn't be stating so concretely what might happen in 100 years.
Y2K was a real threat, and it was with significant coordinated effort that it was resolved.
The ozone hole was (and still is) a significant threat, which was mitigated somewhat by a coordinated effort to stop using CFCs. Unfortunately, there are many more gases that cause huge threats to the protection that the upper atmostphere provides, which have by in large gone unacknowledged by human civilisation as a whole.
Personally, I work in high voltage electricity, and I'm acutely aware of the problems with SF6 as a greenhouse gas (insufficiently regulated under the 1992 Kyoto protocol) and how the exponential growth of SF6 electrical switchgear and subsequent inevitable leaks contributes to a hugely under-represneted threat, which is subject to a 20 year delay for the gas to transition from leaks on the surface to gases distributed throuhgout upper atmosphere.
There are indeed very serious and immediate threats facing humanity, but this article does little to draw attention to them, instead distracting with bullshit hyperbole that is only backed up by a url that leads to:
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Why not log into YouTube? Google already tracks your browser everywhere else - including your online banking, which often you can't access without enabling connections to google.com and gstatic.com (along with the domain you're actually accessing, that provides 3 points of internet routing for highly effective triangulation).
Facebook tracks you even when you're not logged in. Maybe not logging in makes the data they collect slightly less valuable, but they're still collecting it. At least logging in gives you access to a proper watch history.
Saying all that, more power to you if you choose to work around it. However, if you're going to youtube.com to watch things then there isn't really any difference doing so logged in or logged out, for the most part.
The bigger crime is businesses that treat technological advancement as an excuse to charge more for what should be the new baseline standard.