iOS in particular is undoubtedly much better after the EU's required changes.
I wanted the UK to stay in, or at least drop back to EEA membership, but seems we get some of the benefits without membership anyway, just because we're too small to bother doing anything special for.
This is a common trope, but it's based on a false premise. You don't have to show a cookie banner so long as it's cookies that you need for the site to function. You need consent only if you want to track your users and gather their data. The problem here is the sites you visit want to track you, not anything else.
I like having the choice between cookies required for basic site function and extraneous track-you-everywhere cookies. You like having no choice in the matter by the sound of it.
Websites could choose to not track you, to make tacking opt in and having opt out selected as default, could choose to follow do not track as rejecting cookies, they have multiple choices but chose to give you a worse user experience for their profit. I do not think it's fair to complain at Europeans for this, blame the websites
I agree it sucks - and they're not used on every eu website -, but at least it's the small rectangle that says "accept all" "accept essential only" and goes away quite swiftly. Most sites that ask you to click more times to selectr/reject manually are just malicious compliance
No, companies wanting to track everyone who uses their websites / sell user-behaviour data to advertisers made the Internet significantly worse.
The EU just made it visible.
[EDITED to add:] Actually, not even that. The companies doing the creepy tracking/spying/selling chose to make their compliance as objectionable as possible, I think deliberately in order to try to make anti-creeping measures look bad. The internet could be much less obnoxious and still perfectly compatible with EU regulations. Companies wanting to exploit you on the internet chose to comply in as obnoxious a way as possible.
I wanted the UK to stay in, or at least drop back to EEA membership, but seems we get some of the benefits without membership anyway, just because we're too small to bother doing anything special for.