I'd rather poke my eye out than stick up for them. What i'm calling out is the dangerous series of events over the past few years which have been rooted in good intent to preserve privacy, that seem to be having the fallout of destroying the web experience.
[edit] I can't believe HN has turned into a reddit style downvote brigade so i'll just post my response to the below comments in this edit since i can't reply anymore <shrug>
And you've made my point exceedingly clear[1] That pretty much is the ambiguity left up to the whims and fancies of the EU bureaucracy to enforce.
According to noyb.eu , the entity behind famous decisions at the CJEU, consent IS INDEED required[2] for ANY cookies to be stored on a users device. It isn't about data collection , if some rando agency or court finds Github or HN use fingerprinting of user preferences (as an example) or are LIKELY TO. . . it is considered a breach.
A French agency fined Google and Facebook heavily for merely providing a more complex refusal flow for cookies than the accept flow.
[1] https://www.cnil.fr/en/cookies-cnil-fines-google-total-150-m...
[2] https://noyb.eu/en/project/cookie-banners#:~:text=Cookie%20b....