This is a disingenuous argument for that company to make; it's totally reasonable for some browsers (particularly privacy-focused browsers) to have privacy respecting defaults. Microsoft didn't make the change because they wanted to hurt advertisers, they made the change because they had good reason to believe that's the default that the majority of their users wanted.
My take is that if consumers are informed enough that not opting out can be seen as as conscious consent to be tracked, then they're also informed enough that not opting in can be seen as conscious dissent to be tracked. We don't get to selectively decide that users are only stupid in one direction.
On a more cynical level, I've commented to the same effect elsewhere, but I do not believe advertisers when they say that browser defaults were the reason DNT failed. It failed because it was going to see adoption.
If it had remained off by default, but effective promotion campaigns and public education meant 90% of users went and turned it on anyway, advertisers would have come up with another excuse to stop respecting the header. Advertisers weren't ever interested in responsible user consent, they were interested in having some kind of meaningless gesture they could point to when other privacy-respecting solutions got proposed. As soon as that gesture had teeth and was being used by a significant number of people, then it was no longer serving its original purpose. The unspoken terms of the deal were, "most people won't have this header set."
Case in point, the iOS changes that Facebook is going crazy over aren't opt-in or opt-out. They force the user to make a choice, so it's exactly as easy to opt into tracking as it is to opt out of tracking. This seems like an extremely reasonable compromise -- there is no default behavior, the user gets to choose what they want. How can anyone complain about that?
And yet, Facebook is still mad, not because the new dialog is a dark pattern or because it's not capturing users' real preferences, but because Facebook knows that a substantial portion of their users are going to opt out.