Is there a 'town square' where we can talk about being presented captchas and similar things from 3rd party intermediates.
I think it's incredibly likely that millions of hours have been wasted on such challenges.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"
Imagine if people still thought like this about computers and software.
Not to take away from your point, just that it's all a hindrance.
The GDPR does not mandate gratuitous and pointless personalised spying, which is the only case that requires consent. Normal operations (say a shop collecting payment details and shipping address to fulfil an order) do not require a consent banner.
Technically, I think if you have the default Apache logging configured and you read those logs, you should probably float that banner.
GDPR is not "vague" about this; perhaps you haven't read it (as laws go, it's pretty easy to read).
It reminds me of the war on drugs in a lot of ways.