The popups are a result of tracking, not GDPR. Websites without tracking don't need to have them.
It's somewhat amusing that the overlap of garbage content farms and sites with annoying consent popups is almost perfect. I wonder if it could be used for search engine ranking.
Sites can only optimize for what they can see and we've made it so they can only see short-term engagement.
Another is all the annoying cookie popups as a result of GDPR.