GDPR has effectively added a pointless pop up to every serious webpage. It has made the web experience of almost every single user, measurably worse. Hours of my life have been devoted to accepting cookies since GDPR. Complete waste of human life.
That's exactly the line of reasoning that these privacy invading companies want you to follow. The law doesn't mandate obnoxiously huge popups that slow to a crawl when you try to actually use them to disable cookies and whatnot, quite the contrary. It's the companies who are choosing to make the experience as miserable as possible.
The popups only exist because they don't want to be compliant, or they are ignorant, willfully or not.
That will be fixed via browser level integration soon.