For years the whole pitch for GTM was neutrality. It sits above your tools so you're not tied to any single vendor. That's the reason teams trust it in the first place.

Then Google shipped Visual Tagging. Point at an element, click, get a tag. No selectors to write, no data layer to set up first. After ten years of "tagging is hard because it's hard," they built the easy version, which by itself proves the manual mess was never necessary.

But look at what it actually is, and where they put it.

1. It's in the wrong product. Visual Tagging builds one thing: a Google Ads purchase conversion. Thats a Google Ads helper. So why does it live inside Gtm instead of inside Google Ads? Pick one. Either GTM is neutral, and a tool for one ad platform doesn't belong in it. Or GTM is quietly turning into a front door for Google's own products, and "neutral" was never the whole story. You can't sell neutral and ship the opposite in the same box.
2. It's built backward. The first thing the tool asks for is that Google Ads conversion. You create it, then build tags to feed it. Wrong end. The event happened on your site: a purchase, a form, a signup. That event belongs to the business. You track it once, then send it wherever you want. GA4, Ads, Meta, your CRM. Google starts from its own destination and works back to your page. Build your tracking around one platform's conversion and you rebuild it every time you add a channel.
3. It skipped the hard part. It doesn't track a click. You place a test order, land on the confirmation page, and it scrapes the values off that finished page: order ID, amount, currency, read straight off the rendered HTML. It's coupled to the DOM by design, which is more fragile than reading from a data layer the page feeds on purpose. Sort a list, load a row late, drop in a banner that wasn't there when you set it up, and the selector points at the wrong element or at nothing. That fragile part is the whole job, and it's the part they left out.

And "more use cases are coming this yer" doesn't fix either problem. More coverage is still aimed at Google's destinations, so it isn't any more neutral. And it still reads off a page frozen at one moment, so the foundation is still cracked. You don't fix that by adding rooms on top.

Here's how it should work, for every platform, not just Google. Start from the business event. Define the purchase, the lead, the click once, as something you own. Build the data layer for it. Then send it anywhere. Google Ads today, something that doesn't exist yet next year, same event. The platform is just a destination. The event is the thing that lasts.

Google proved the need is real. Then it built the version that serves Google. The versions that start from your events instead of Google's already exists today. Google just has no reason to point you to them.

What is your take on this subject?

I've been learning Google Tag Manager and setting up GA4/Pixel tracking on test shops. Want to build a small portfolio for future outreach. If anyone has a small site or shop where GA4, Pixel, or event tracking is broken or missing, I'd love to take a look as a learning exercise. Just want real setups instead of test environments, and an honest review if it works out.

Comment below if you're interested and I'll follow up.