Its more nuanced than that. Even companies that do not track, and use only essential cookies, ask for consent, as the consensus among compliance teams and external lawyers is "its safer this way". Thats the reality which the regulators failed to anticipate.

Of course this misses a bigger point that tracking in the web moved in a direction that requires no cookies whatsoever, and if anything, feels more pervasive than it ever was.

And it misses the even bigger point, that the morons who legislated cookie consent did not notice either of those two realities. And the same thing is already true with the AI act; the text watermarking is trivially defeated and everyone knows it. And I'd bet it will remain a requirement for the next decade or three.