Probably because they were fielding complaints from their readers.

I took down a fully static public web page that had basically no traffic and no cookies. It literally just said that a domain that I had was not associated with a popular brand name that was on a different TLD so don’t email me about it.

I got as many emails complaining there was no cookie banner as I had previously gotten about the brand. There is some brand of privacy crank out there that likes to harass people about those banners (and similar gdpr regs).