> Of course, I know in practice most people don't understand what their browsers are doing, and there aren't a ton of practical choices for people around what their browser sends, and the internet is no longer an optional thing for a lot of our lives.

This is the root problem. Your browser is supposed to be your agent. It's the User Agent, after all! It should be working on the user's behalf, users should understand what their browsers are doing, and browsers shouldn't be doing anything without the user understanding and affirmatively consenting to it. I should be the ultimate authority over what my browser sends, and browsers should make it trivial to exercise that authority.

In reality, the browser is Somebody Else's Agent. It's working for the web developer, giving him all sorts of things that make his life easier. And it's working for the advertiser, providing tracking clues and fingerprinting. And it's working for the browser developer, collecting metrics and telemetry and god knows what else for them to do god knows what with. But, it's not really working for me or on my behalf anymore, I'm just a passenger in the car.

EDIT: Understood that IP address is not something under the browser's control, and it's unfortunately necessary to reveal in order to connect to a web site. It's a terrible mis-feature that IP addresses (by default without a VPN) can be reliably mapped to countries, state/provinces, and sometimes even cities. This is a huge design flaw in how we hand out IPs. In a better world, having an IP address shouldn't reveal anything about someone's geographic location.