No they did absolutely not say that! They said I need informed consent before I collect your personal identifiable information. Nothing prevents me from instead of using a banner, for example having a small widget in the footer or elsewhere on my site if I were to want to collect it (I have no analytics or cookies on my site at all).
And next thing you know, there'd be people complaining about "dark patterns" where the small widget is designed to be very easy to overlook and (more importantly) someone may inadvertently use the site briefly before noticing that they can turn off tracking. Whoops, you just got tracked.
A modal makes it obvious what's happening on the site and gives you a chance to opt-out before proceeding. There really is no better way to do it that's going keep everyone happy. People just don't want to admit that the only way to properly implement this feature is to annoy people.
The fundamental and default part of the law is to NOT track. Tracking by default (opt-out) is illegal. A modal is just a way to annoy you until you consent against your will.
https://gdpr.eu/article-6-how-to-process-personal-data-legal...
Explain how you'd do that without a banner or similarly annoying UX
Of course if your answer is “people should just stop using cookies” then I have bad news for you.