There's been an overall progression toward intrusiveness for as long as commerce has been on the internet. We had "sign up for our newsletter" and other pop-ups

There's been an overall progression toward intrusiveness for as long as commerce has been on the internet. We had "sign up for our newsletter" and other pop-ups way before GDPR. I think popup blockers turned back the tide for a while, but businesses eventually learned how to leverage dialogs for some of the same purposes. And, over time, that's been rolled up into WordPress plugins and other easy to implement solutions for one-off site owners, which makes them even more common.