You are correct, the discussion is often unthoughtful and spun.

> the bulk of the population an advertiser would actually care about would be the huge middle of the bell curve on Chrome using Windows

The middle of the bell curve in the USA would be an iPhone and there is very little you can customize. So many people have the same model with the same settings that trying to track by fingerprinting is effectively useless.

Yes, PC/Linux users have more to track. They are the minority though. I'm not saying therefore ignore this issue. But grandma is using her phone. Not a PC.

> Firefox sends some dummy data when making use of privacy.resistFingerprinting, and so you should get a unique fingerprint _every time_ you visit a site

This assumes the fingerprinter can't filter out that random data, and that the feature is actually useful. Some of things it does sound like sites might fail or cause problems. Setting timezone to something else seems like I'm going to make a reservation for 7pm only to find out it was 7pm in another timezone. other things it doesn't might not be good for grandma. CSS will report preferred reduced motion as False. CSS will report preferred contrast as No Preference.

I definitely agree with you point, but I think that's what I'm wondering about? Can it actually be filtered out, and are tracking companies actually do this in practice, or is it like when someone says they bridge an airgap by making two computer's RF spectrum do funny things? Possible in a lab, yes. Something most people need to worry about? No.

I'm not saying this _isn't_ the case for tracking -- I just don't have much of a way to know what techniques are actually being employed in real life.