It's important to understand that while people might think that the pop-ups are required by the law, this is not true and most pop-ups today have no legal effect regardless of what you click. The GDPR requires express consent. If the pop-up uses a dark pattern to make "refusing consent" difficult, then clicking on whatever it takes to make the pop-up go away isn't consent.

And just setting a cookie doesn't necessarily need consent either, if it's used directly to provide the service (eg. a cookie to track your login session or your shopping basket).

A change requires the authorities to actually start enforcing this. https://noyb.eu is campaigning for this.