I hope the EU sticks to their guns. A few years ago, there was a flood of HN posts about optimizing initial page loads etc, because research showed that even a few hundred milliseconds slower load times measurably affected how often people clicked on buttons named "buy" and "sign up" and the likes. Then GDPR happened, and this somehow became a non-topic and instead we get 3-screen tall "TrustArc" modals that take half a second responding to a click? This makes no sense at all!
I hope, and believe, that it's just a matter of time before people re-discover that yes, actually, if you make a page fast and nice and friendly, you get more clicks/signups/purchases/$kpi, and that cookie banners hurt business.
If this is true, then what we're seeing now is just the initial path of least resistance: do what we did before, plus do what the lawyers tell us to. As the key GDPR rules have gradually become "common knowledge", we ought to be seeing gradually more sites switch their approach and focus on fast UX again, ie, no cookie banners and thus no tracking. Sure, it's work, and I bet the math doesn't always work out against tracking, but I bet often enough it does.