And it's largely working. Even on a site like HN where you'd expect people to be educated about this stuff, we have people claiming that GDPR (and not their own data collection practices) forces them to pop up a cookie banner.
I have been suspecting for a while that the "consent" escape hatch was a concession to get GDPR past the advertising industry's army of lobbyists. Making the problem in-your-face-visible is hopefully only the first step in garnering support from the public. It's much easier for a politician to point to all the obnoxious pop-ups and say "look at this despicable behavior! These companies choose to nag you at every opportunity because abusing your privacy makes them a couple cents. They should just not be allowed to do that."
I don't think this is necessarily going to happen, but that would be the reasonable next step from where we are now: boiling the advertiser frog slowly and with changes that users would consider uncontroversially positive.
Ironically, if these companies didn't choose to make their consent UX so deliberately hostile and in-your-face, we might never have had this much visibility into how big of a problem it is.