That’s what cheese glue sticks are for!

They are usually separate things. Cookies are produced/saved locally, to be read in the next visit (by the same website or maany websites basically forever unless you use firefox containers or at least clear them once in a while). There’s also local storage which is different but can also be used to identify you across the web. Ads, trackers, all of these categories are often made of many small components: you read a single article on a “modern” newspaper website, hundreds of connection are being made, different tiny scripts or icons or images are being downloaded (usually from different subdomains for different purposes but there’s no hard rule). It’s possible to block one thing and not another. For example I can block Google Analytics (googletagmanager) which is a tracker, but accept all of Google’s cookies.

Most people give their real full name, phone number and email for any loyalty card wothout batting an eye, plus even with anonymized data it’s useful to the owners to track correlation of purchases, time, location. Definitively what you said too, we all make mistakes (some more than others), every needless complication of a system is a disadvantage to the customer.

There are free services that allow you to create countless emails, one per site is ideal, just like one (different) password per site. Addy and Simplelogin have a generous free tier, last I checked the first one allows for unlimited receive-only addresses (when shopping it’s very rare you need to respond), the second gives you some two-way addresses.

If you get a domain, many registrars include free mail service, and have mail forwarding, or “redirecting”, which basically will allow you to create countless addresses (that can also send/respond) for your one account (You add these “email forwards”, or “Identities”, to your app of choice, like K9-Mail for android). You don’t necessarily need to buy their separate email package (although the interface might be more convenient). I’ll give you one example which includes email: OVHcloud, one of the largest clouds in europe.

If you can afford it there are all-in-one services like Soverin with easier interface.

It might be wise to start a slow process of migrating (or maybe deleting and creating again) accounts, and saving all this stuff in a password manager (like KeepassXC) if you aren’t already.

Btw Plasma 6 is glorious. First time Wayland “just works” without me noticing too.

Recently wanted to try KDE 6 on my second laptop and after being pissed off at the lack of encryption with Void installer (gotta do it manually, have done it in the past but I’m lazy), another fail with NixOs (known bug with encryption in the latest stable installer) the easiest way was installing Arch lol.

I used archinstall as suggested, just answer questions, no manual voodoo incantation required. You can do it.