I don't know how the experience is in US, but in EU it's because GDPR is a complete failure of a law which doesn't actually solve any problem.
For example I used to work for a hosting provider. An admin noticed that one of the hosted customers had customer data exposed to the internet without a password. Due to the GDPR he was forced to contact the customer about it, or our company could be held responsible (since we knew about it).
What you are objecting to is specifically the part of that law which mandates consent for gathering personal data, and which resulted in these cookie banners. That's annoying (mostly because a lot of media companies rather continue hovering up data instead of critically assessing the need to do so), but it doesn't invalidate the better parts of the GDPR. Calling it a complete failure is unnecessarily hyperbolic.
What is unfortunate that law puts the onus on implementing the dialog for individual sites, it should be feature of browsers. This way users could enforce from browser settings that they don't want to be tracked.
And the consent banners are industry's own inventions. They could have honored do-not-track and be done with it. Instead, they opted for these dark patterns.
Choose the most disruptive, asinine way to comply with them. Then argue that the regulation is at fault, and lobby to have it removed.
For example, there's been plans recently in Norway to tax the salmon farming industry more heavily. The response from the industry has been to pretend that this will completely decimate the industry(we'll have to fire tons of folks to protect our massive profit margins hurr durr), which the numbers don't seem to bear that out. But now they've managed to convince the workers and they've been protesting to "protect their jobs" when they're actually just being used as pawns to protect a billionaire from taxes.