Ask HN: What constitutes acceptance of a site's cookie policy?

I recently found myself (by accident) browsing a Daily Mail article on mobile. The screen was 30% taken up by a top banner requesting that I install the Daily Mail app, and the GDPR cookie permission request took up the lower 50%. The middle 20% window was not comfortable enough to read the text, so I pressed the "X" on the app install screen. This made the app banner disappear, but it also made the GDPR request banner disappear and be replaced by a message thanking me for accepting the policy.

What, ethically and legally, constitutes acceptance of a cookie policy? Is it ok to assume that if the user further interacts with the website beyond loading the page, that they implicitly accept the storage of cookies in the user's browser and tracking that goes along with it? In Europe, isn't it necessary to explicitly obtain user consent for this?