Browser Cookie Manual Management

I recently clicked on a link from HN which took me to the web site Nature.

Due to all this privacy stuff, web sites are now automatically popping up these 'cookie manager' thingys. Nature's seemed to be the biggest and most complicated I've seen so far. I couldn't take it. I departed their site. Probably never to return.

Don't most reasonable people simply find the one selection which provides for minimal state tracking and nothing else? And of course, the web site operator will hide/obfuscate/make-it-difficult to find that one, as it is not the one they want selected.

And if most reasonable people do that, why do have this vast selection of cookies? Are there actually people who selectively enable particular tracking and marketing cookies? What is happening behind the scenes to create the desire for web site operators to pop up these increasingly complicated selection boxes? I thought the single click GDPR boxes were burdensome, but things are now really getting out of hand.