We have several near-trillion-dollar companies that basically have no viable business model other than doubling down on targeted advertising. If third-party cookies get demonized or GDPR'd to death, they need to pivot to SOMETHING else that still fits into the same profiling paradigm.
I suspect it's not about results or innovation anymore, it's about being a moat. Only a trillion-dollar company with huge scale and scope can possibly build and maintain "high quality" profiles, so it's a great way to spread FUD against any competing, potentially actually privacy-first, ad-tech upstarts.
I'm sort of waiting for the "Emperor has no clothes" moment. We see the occasional "Brand stops advertising for 6 months and sales stay on trend" story, or the "our best conversions come from real content and relevant direct ads" story. We have the fact that ad spend grows and yet publishers starve, implying the middlemen are taking an ever-larger chunk of value out of the ecosystem in exchange for their services. It's gonna be ugly when the dots are joined.