Ethical Marketing for Startups

Hey HN, disillusioned startup founder here. I am not naive enough to believe that building a good product is all it takes -- marketing is very important too. However, the marketing tactics that do seem to work (at least in the short term) seem very unsavoury to me. Let's start with the tracking. Apparently it's imperative to track as much as possible (to measure "effectiveness") by peppering a thousand tracking pixels and dodgy scripts everywhere within your site and your product. Next you need to make a lot of noise to be heard over your competitors and stay in the headlines. Generating a ton of nonsensical clickbait content using ChatGPT and their ilk seems to be the preferred method here. There are also human content farms for hire where thoroughly unqualified people churn out authoritative-sounding articles that are good enough to impress non-technical buyers who don't have a clue. Don't even get me started on the stalking and spamming of prospects with the aforementioned junk content. Then there's the eye-watering carbon footprint associated with travelling to various conferences for promotional purposes and giving away swag that are definitely not eco-friendly neither in their manufacture nor their disposal.

Am I being too idealistic here? Is this just how business works nowadays or are there better, more ethical ways to market your product?