Yeah, tracking probably throws the ads into a local minima. But ad algos don't care about conversion, they care about charging the ad buyer more.
Bingo. The users clicking the ads aren't the ones funding the advertising networks - it's the people buying the ads. If you can convince them that targeted ads are more effective (and it would certainly be a safe assumption based on most peoples' understanding) then you can charge them more.
I'm not sure why you're being so heavily downvoted for this, but the presence of so many people "in the industry" in this thread might be some indication.
But I've yet to see some actual controlled evidence showing clear data in terms of sales that we can be reasonably sure were generated by targeted advertising. I think such evidence probably does exist, I'm not saying I don't believe it just yet. But all the arguments here seem to confuse science with scientism--what we have is a lot of reasoning and academic explanations of how people think it works, which is just not the same as evidence. It doesn't matter if something sounds like the way it might work in real life, we have to make observations to call something data. I haven't seen much data here.
So why do ads follow you even after you bought the product? Well the ads are still less than 1% effective (products sold / by ads shown), so for the average company (not Amazon) it is just not worth the engineering effort for a < 1% savings on your remarketing budget. Secondly, this is more speculation, but for many products the chance of buying a product given you have already bought one (e.x. a spare or a gift) is still higher than chance for a random person. As such the ads are still effective.
So what is the deal with the NYTimes? They a huge popular publisher (especially amount rich people) already command high ad prices through traditional adverstising. The value of a remarking ad (to the advertiser) is largely independent of the site that it is shown on. So The New York Times would naturally have fewer of these ads because the adverstiser gets more ads/$ on other sites. A diffrent site like a local paper might have a diffrent story. However remarketing ads have never been a large percentage of ads shown so from a revenue stand point publishers care a lot less about them.
Its a not very well kept secret of internet advertising that it's so much more "measurable" than other types of advertising, but it's not actually measuring anything useful most of the time. There is the traditional quote that "I am wasting half my advertising budget, but I can't tell which half" With internet remarketing ads the answer might very well be both ;)