I think you are right. I don't like it, but as a user, I appear to be in a minority. My wife is not concerned about tracking nearly as much as I am. She was ok with ads disappearing from her Kindle, but she does not want to fiddle with anything. And to be perfectly honest, the older I get, the harder it is for me to devote time to do that as well. I even accepted BT pairing in car. That said, I already placed a line in the sand on BT for oven/fridge/toaster/younameit.
Now, sure, I'm sure the response of the people here is "But I turned it off because I want to have to use settings to turn it back on." And that's fine. But that's not the use case for most users, I strongly suspect. Having a phone that just works with crazy kitchen gadgets is something of real value.