> It's not the EU's fault that you have to click cookie banners. Those banners are only required if a website plans to do malicious things with the cookies.

I just check some web pages from diffrent organs of the EU:

https://commission.europa.eu/select-language?destination=/no...

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/de/european-council/

https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/ins...

They all have cookie banners, some of them are super prominent and annoying. So maybe they as well are doing malicious things, maybe they don't understand they own regulation, or it is just impossible to have a non-trivial web page without a cookie banner in 2023. In either case, the regulation is totally dettached from reality and has become just some ritual.