alt Hacker News> the consenst banner is required either way.
Consent is required. The banner is just one mechanism, but not required. A website could hold off on all tracking until a suitable point in the usage of the site (like creating a profile, for example) and ask at that point.
The banner is an artefact of the hostile way most sites choose to try and hoodwink the user into being monetised and ultimately to piss users off so much that they complain about the legislation rather than the lack of online privacy.
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When there is "legitimate purpose" there isn't reason to as soon items are put in the shopping cart this has to be tracked (be it session in url, cookie, local storage, ...) and no consent is needed.
The exact definition of "legitimate purpose" is unspecific (which is important to be able to adapt to development of new services) which leads to some lawyers being careful.
I also claim that some lobby groups promote having too many and too big consent banners to move blame from tracking companies to the EU ("stupid EU forcing all those banners!") in order to reverse the policy on tracking, which seems to have some effect.
I know it's tempting to put this consent-banner anti-pattern all on toxic ad-driven platforms, because their motives are bad.
The problem with this view, though, is that even the very agencies propagating these rules do the exact same thing! You can go to any site from an EU arm and get the same banners.
At this point, you can't really blame it on bad-faith actors, you have to accept that it's a bad rule. Which is not to say I know a better one!
And there was an initiative to include tracking preferences in browser HTTP headers, which never made it, as it was quite obvious that this would lead to a lot of people opting out.
Better to just harass them into a habit of dismissing the banner.