Unfortunately, at least in Germany it’s legal. There was a special ruling recently.

(Link in German)

https://www.datenschutzkonferenz-online.de/media/pm/DSK_Beschluss_Bewertung_von_Pur-Abo-Modellen_auf_Websites.pdf

If something looks, walks, barks and smells like a dog, chances are, it’s a dog.

The world is complicated enough as is, no need to make it more complicated.

It moved to symfony starting with contao 4. You can now either use it as a self-managed CMS or add it to an existing symfony application to add CMS functionality. Great stuff.

Most of the community is German speaking though, keep that in mind.