Yeah, I'd be pretty mad if I had to log into a website every time I opened it or be blinded by a white screen at night when I toggled the dark theme last time I visited. There's so many good uses for storage to make things behave as one would expect. And it'd be a lot of friction to have permission dialogs for things as basic as cookies or localStorage.
I agree cookies have proven to be a largely pro-user feature over time but do you remember the backlash from techies and reporters alike when browsers first started implementing cookies back in the 90s?
Yup. Cookies are neat little chunks of things that a website puts on my computer that I then transmit back to it.
What is localstorage? Localstorage isn't little nor is it necessarily transmitted back.