This is perfectly legal, the law only says that the user must freely choose to allow the website to save said data. You can opt out here and not use that website.
I wish. In the end it all depend on how individual countries interpret the EU law. In France it was decided that "either let us shit all over your privacy or pay a subscription" was okay and in the spirit of the law.
It's bullshit IMO, but lots of sites ran with it. So those I refuse to interact with now.
This is very common in the EU. The majority of news sites do it. I believe it's technically legal because they aren't under obligation to provide a free access at all
Idk what's the big deal, honestly. Remember the memes about yt premium, "I either give you my money, or my data, but not both"? Well, it's kinda like that. The caveat is, their payment provider likely still collects data, and some info is saved on the backend anyways, but that's another can of worms.
To me it looks more like they're saying they'll monetize their work no matter what, tho. One way is through direct payments by those who consider their articles worth paying for, then they don't need to sell userdata or show ads; the other way is selling userdata. Well, there's also non-targeted advertising, but mb it doesn't worth as much or something (and targeted ads already pay close to nothing from a single viewer, afaik).
Where I personally draw the line is when such subscriptions still include ads (looking at you, "ad-free" disney+) or have unnecessarily large costs and so on. I mean, if they charge close to what they're making with ads and selling data, we could get most websites ~tracker-free for probably a couple of bucks a month each. This, in turn, lessens the power of ad network owners, which again makes the web better. Although, mb I'm idealizing too much, idk.