If it weren't for the cookie banners (I blame the EU, but I'm open to corrections), I'd agree with you.
The alternative is much worse, which is having zero say in tracking cookies. I'll take a banner on every single website to have more control of that.
I really don't see the issue. If you really find them annoying, use ublock with a proper cookie banner filter or something like that
You don't need a cookie banner if you aren't doing anything shady. Using cookies (or other such mechanisms) does not require information or consent popups when they're necessary to make the product/service work for technical reason - the canonical example being session cookies.
The corollary here being, you only need consent popups if you're doing something shady but not strictly illegal. They're not meant to be annoying - they're there because it's illegal to do shady shit without the user agreeing to it, and "agreeing" in the EU means "informed consent". So you have to inform, and then get consent.
It's all pretty reasonable. But of course, people doing shady shit really don't want the users to understand it and risk them not consenting - and they especially hate having to ask in the first place. The industry settled on a "malicious compliance" approach to GDPR - show popups that, as much as they can get away with it, maximize the chance of people consenting to make the popup go away, make the "informed" part as opaque as possible, and generally make this thing super annoying - and then tell people it's all EU's fault, hoping enough Europeans will buy it and the public pressure will make EU undo GDPR.
https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en
If cookie banners were not designed to be required... why does the EU pages themselves use them?
https://gdpr.eu/privacy-policy/
https://european-union.europa.eu/cookies_en
Though again, not ideal IMO; based on skimming those policies, I think they could've set it up so consent popup only shows in specific situations that trigger the need for it. That, and I don't get why they use (a minimal build of) Google Analytics, and let that data fly over to the US (which they explicitly acknowledge). That's just lazy.
Maintaining the same interface as europa.eu is the least risky approach and so everyone does it that way.
If one wants to say "the GDPR doesn't mandate cookie banners" then it should be the GDPR site in europa.eu that demonstrates how that can be done with other styles of cookie consent.
Until then, it is perfectly fair and reasonable to assert that the GDPR requires it because the GDPR site itself uses it and companies that haven't done it that way have gotten fined.
Note that's a company page that the EU pays to do it.. the EU government page is even worse. https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...