Why then do they make the most annoying, user-hostile dark pattern cookie banners they can come up with? No, website operators hate that they have to either stop spamming thousands of tracker scripts or put up a banner.
They found out that they can offload blame on the EU instead and so have chosen to make the web as annoying as possible.
Most of them don’t care and just integrate whatever is the most common cookie banner widget because their legal team asked them to
Yeah, that's more the point; in discussions with clients I very often get asked how far we can go without any consent. Most companies want all the privacy ignoring stuff and they don't want to tell their users about it.