Those aren’t comparable at all. DNT is a header that required cooperation; nothing to work around. privacy.resistFingerprinting actually solves fingerprinting, and if it were enabled by default it would be incredibly effective. (It won’t be anytime soon, because it breaks many features that average users rely on, via average websites - but individual aspects of it could trickle in.)

If you were worried that determined parties would develop new tracking technologies as a response, rest assured that they’re always doing that.

Other folks point out major differences between the two. The most important one, though, is that DNT required the server to comply.

Disabling or lying with JS method calls doesn't.

And there is an arms race, and it will not end. That is the nature of adversarial intelligence-gathering.

A user-agent should do what it thinks is in the users best interest. People don't want to have to micromanage it. If it needs to be set up manually it's undermining itself and preventing it's own success. Ultimately it was not a good offer, and Microsoft, not being in the ads business, was correct in rejecting it.

EDIT: Removed wording about the intentions of the inventors.

> The inventors of DNT wanted to look good without actually changing anything

I don't believe that's a fair characterisation at all. The inventors of DNT may have been over-optimistic about potential adoption, but the intention was most certainly to bring about change.

> enabling it by default ultimately led to it being completely meaningless

No, DNT was completely meaningless from the moment it was proposed. Enabling it by default was just Microsoft pointing out that the emperor had no clothes. I don't even agree with you that it was well-intentioned; IMO it was a bad faith effort to push a non-fix, to try and hoodwink people into not calling for regulation and/or technical solutions with actual teeth.

Solutions which require cooperation from hostile attackers (i.e. advertisers) are not solutions.