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.
I think it's pretty simple. drusepth wants targeting on, so of course drusepth also wants default on. It is generally desirable for defaults to match what you want since it saves you effort to configure.
I am okay with targeted ads, and I know others are too. The other day, my Dad said he's happy that Amazon and Google are showing him the products he's been browsing for recently. They bought a mattress and are looking at buying another to replace the other beds.
I'd guess the majority of people don't hold a strong opinion on them one way or the other, and being default-on for more people results in more data that can be used to make ads more relevant for everyone (and likely improve adtech in general), instead of just relying on whatever subset of users actually know to opt in.
