What the policy actually targets
The 2017 policy is narrower than its reputation. It applies to an interstitial that covers the main content immediately on arrival from search, or a standalone one that must be dismissed before the content appears.
Explicitly exempt: interstitials required by law such as cookie consent and age verification, login walls for genuinely private content, and banners that use a reasonable portion of the screen without covering the content.
So the fix is rarely to delete the popup. Delaying it until after some engagement — a scroll depth, a few seconds, a second page — removes both the ranking risk and the immediate bounce, and typically converts better than an interruption served to someone who has not yet read anything.