that's not a design disaster, that's a company privacy disaster. The cookie laws just make transparent and explicit the amount of tracking that businesses engage in. The target of your criticism should not be the EU, it should be websites who put stumbling blocks into the user experience because they want to force you to consent to their data gathering. Compliance could be very simple without any cookie banners, just let the user opt-in and turn it off by default.
In the best case a cookie banner gives me an opportunity to trust a site owner (not necessarily a company) that they won‘t use cookies to do invasive tracking I didn’t agree to. Oftentimes sites just straight up require consent to „necessary“ cookies in order to use the site at all. In these cases the EU imposed Cookie Banners don’t even give me the option to disable cookie based tracking. In other cases it takes minutes of my time to navigate the cookie banner to get the desired results.
Why should I choose such an ineffective solution if there are superior technical solutions to the same problem such as privacy aware browsers or extensions that don’t require user trust in site owners compliance but stop cookie based tracking on a technical level ?
The Cookie banner legislation actually did nothing at all for privacy, quite the opposite it made browsing the web in incognito mode much more annoying as you’re constantly forced to close cookie banners before beeing able to consume the actual on-site content. (Googles (coincidental?) Decision to disallow chrome extensions in incognito mode renders relevant anti-cookie-banner extensions useless)
