Blocking cookies by itself will not do anything against tracking, nor will it remove the need for consent prompts because they still need consent for the aforementioned non-cookie tracking methods.
Similar to the real-world, there are a lot of things that can be used for good as well as for evil. A car can be used for transportation but can also be used to run people over; this doesn't mean we're just going to ban all cars or make them non-functional because otherwise some people might use them to hurt others - we rely on laws to prevent misuse instead.
The law could say something like: If you are collecting data in order to create an profile of a person, and the person did not ask you to do a job which require such profiling, then you must ask for permission.
Nothing about cookies, nothing about a popup, just intention and consent. And here come the surprise. That is current GDPR. It mention cookies exactly once, as part of an non-exhausted example list of identifiers which is commonly used in order to profile people. Cookies has the same importance in GDPR as profiling a person based on what screen resolution your device has, and you may notice that there are no screen-resolution-accept-banners anywhere.