The EU has trained 400m people to unthinkingly accept all pop ups, on every website they visit.
Discussion
This has to be one of the worst and most stupid policy to come out of the European Union. And that really says something
I and my team are actually responsible for one of those pop-ups that most people see, and I agree that consent pop-ups are a really unfortunate outcome of the regulations
I think the intent of the regulations back when they were written was good, but there were two problems:
(1) The unintended consequence of so many annoying pop-ups was not an anticipated
(2) GDPR applied to all providers, however small, and put a lot of burden on small companies and non-profits
The good news is that the upcoming DMA and DSA regulations are taking into account problem (2), as most of their regulatory burden falls only on very large companies (such as mine) which have the resources to handle the burden, and where most of the potential user harm is
For what its worth, I'm working internally in my company to greatly reduce the number of consent pop-ups that people are subjected to, while still remaining compliant
Online services should use 3rd party identifiers and shouldn’t even need to hold any user information at all.