That said, I disabled that creator follow nonsense the moment it landed. Not because of the URL tracking, but because it is stupid.
None attempted to load with the browser I am using. I was able to read the text of the article and follow any links on the page no problem.
One could hope that "web developers" will stop accepting money in return for putting this garbage into pages. IMHO this is unlikely to happen.
Alternatively, for recreational web use, one can stop using the browsers that auto-load the garbage by default. I did this and has worked better and better for over 20 years.
The popular browsers supplied by so-called "tech" companies have many "features" but they do not allow users to disable auto-loading.
The minute that software engineers stop working for Google and Facebook…
But the other day I used a clean browser to search for something in a store and the first search result was for a competing store! Very sneaky. It's all so fascinating.
The way internet is made, you either go onlyfans style paid only model where every "consumer" pays or like wikipedia where everything is open. Ads don't work, tracking doesn't work. What i mean by not working is that with tools like ublock origin, these "one trick pony" fail so then they make the appeal "but think about the creator".
If you are so concerned about your revenues, go do onlyfans. otherwise assume you will not get any revenue ads.
That is unacceptable. When your operating system can't be trusted, it's time to move to a different platform.