The law does not mandate cookie banners. Cookie popups are malicious compliance by advertising and analytics companies to continue spying.

The real solution is to tighten what counts as consent.

I don’t know if people are noticing this but apple.com doesn’t have a cookie banner. It’s perfectly possible to operate a website – even a shop – without having a cookie banner. Even one of the biggest here in Europe in terms of revenue. As OP said, cookie banners are just malicious compliance. You don’t need one unless you’re doing shady things. Unfortunately it looks like the advertisers and trackers are winning as the EU is planing to relax the rules. I believe there would have been another way, something like banning unnecessary tracking altogether.

It does mandate cookie banners. The client I worked for on the last project got fined because they were missing a cookie banner.

The solution is much simpler - ban targeted ads. The entire purpose of collecting user data is to deliver targeted ads.

Nah, they were fined for tracking users without consent.

And cookie banners are what exactly? That's right, you ask users to consent to use cookies to track them. Thus, cookie banners are REQUIRED because you can't run a business without any insight into how your users use your product.

So, they reinvented Do Not Track?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track

The EU’s oppressive regulations are based an absurd lack of understanding of how technology works. If consumers find an aspect of the protocol bothersome they have the power to use a browser or extension that makes it possible to block or disable it. We do not need a nanny state government imposing fines and threats on legitimate well intentioned websites. IMHO: Good riddance to this broken regulation.

Was the brutal cookie banner on the site a dig at cookie banners?

Disabling javascript for the site got rid of it. It does so for many sites.