No one likes these consent modals, not the EU, not the companies, not the end users.

But they're good.

They're making the negative externality visible. We had developed an ecosystem where as soon as you clicked on a webpage it would spaff your personal data to third party brokers and infest you with tracking across the entire internet. All driven by marketing and sales departments. All driven by a capitalist free market.

The regulations changed nothing other than to make people annoyed by this. Good. Take that anger and direct it against the god damn companies building this stuff, many of the employees of which are on this site. Stop whining about the EU, they're just holding up a mirror to the abject horror of tech.