Don't worry about cookies or bother using a VPN, because... you are being tracked anyway? What's the point of including such a defeatist stance?
> the real world across industry, academia, and government.
Gotcha, so no one here gives a shit about privacy. They only care about avoiding the inconveniences of fraud and leaked secrets.
Use a password manager and a feature-complete adblocker (ublock origin on Firefox). Send messages over end-to-end encrypted channels. Use a VPN along with your adblocker and some kind of cookie/browser-id isolation if you don't want your traffic stalked.
BTW, I really would like to have a way to partially clear cookies – i.e., I don't want to be signed out of gmail, and maybe not out of the Mechanic's Bank of Alaska or Amazon or Netflix, but most other things could go. I don't think this is easy in Chrome, Safari or other mainstream browsers, is it?
Yesyes, I do know that Big Ad can mostly stitch together some proxy profile of me anyway, but it would be more blurry.