So if:

- you always denied those popups

- .. including any hidden legitimate interest sections that are being treated as a second, opt-out "consent" for things that really don't actually qualify as legitimate interest

- and the companies actually followed it

Then in theory the companies won't have that data. But doing 1 is tedious, companies exercise dark patterns to avoid you doing 2, and it's hard to audit if they've done 3, so most people are probably in those data sets.

Also, a government likely to buy this data for purposes like in the original article, is unlikely to be the type of government that goes around slapping companies for not complying with privacy regulation on that data.