Many signup forms do seem to use this pattern. I never leave it in the opt-in state. Ever. And a vast number of these companies go ahead and email me anyway.

Many signup forms do seem to use this pattern. I never leave it in the opt-in state. Ever. And a vast number of these companies go ahead and email me anyway. Sometimes they’re 100% marketing emails and they’ve just blatantly ignored my opt out, other times the emails are under the guise of being related to my account/purchase as opposed to marketing (eg those annoying drip feed “getting started with our product” daily emails) but the lines are very (deliberately) blurred. In either case, the amount of inbound communication seems very heavily geared towards benefiting the company in being able to send out marketing messages / increase “engagement” as opposed to being actually necessary or useful from the point of view of a customer. These thoroughly annoy me. Edit: ironically Cloudflare is among the few companies who I do willingly receive marketing emails from - but even so, if the unsubscribe flow is as OP described, this is not really acceptable and needs looking at.