Surely they'd be happy to opt-in to FLoC.

I've blocked ads for so long that I can't remember the last time I saw one. However, if I had to have them, I think I could tolerate ads that were relevant to the content of the page.

If I'm reading an article about gardening, I could understand seeing an ad or two about gardening tools. It's what my mind is focused on, it's relevant, and it's even potentially something I might want to buy. This doesn't require FLoC, cookies, or any other form of tracking.

What I do not want to happen after reading my gardening article, is to be dogged relentlessly for days with ads for gardening tools on every website I visit, and in apps on my phone. It's creepy, it's irrelevant to what I'm currently focused on, and it's creating a negative impression in my mind about the businesses that are appearing in the ads.

There is no evidence tracking-based ads are more fruitful than contextual ads. That is what you should tell your non-tech person.

If you're going to hold a gun to my head and force me to give you the contents of my wallet, you can at least be polite about it and say please and thank you.

If I have to be on the receiving end of non-consensual sex, I at least want the perpetrator to wear protection and be STD free.

The particular phenomena at play there is an early stage of Stockholm Syndrome/learned helplessness, and it isn't a good thing. It is also a byproduct of intentioned shaping of dialogue and expectation normalization that has been an ongoing effort by Big Tech for decades.

Don't be fooled.

As a consumer, I want targeting features default-on, but I also don't mind too much having to turn them on manually.

The thing is that I could actually see this working, because advertisers and publishers would have to incentivize people for turning the feature on. If it became widespread known that turning targeting on resulted in seeing relevant 10% discount ads a lot of people would give up privacy for that, probably for less.

You can see this behaviour in the success of browser extensions like Honey which are privacy nightmares to people like us, but totally acceptable to most people.