Back in the 90s we had cookie confirmation things. A browser called konqueror even had it on by default. Every time a server tried to set a cookie you got a chance to say no, etc…
For users it was as awful then as the experience is now.
The people who made this law seemed to be under the impression that sites would react by removing cookies. This is naive or plain stupid. Instead what we have now is that every single site has a popup saying "Lorem ipsum" (nobody reads this), and you have to click "fuck off" to get to the content.
I would LIKE to say that all this law does is annoy people. I would like that, but no. Instead what it does is train literally billions of people to click "fuck off" (actual text is usually something like "I agree", but what the user means is "fuck off, I'm trying to read the article"), without reading what the box says.
ACTUAL security problems now, or ACTUAL choices, now cannot be warned about. Because if users were not good at reading actual meaningful warnings before, they sure as hell don't read them now.
So not only is this law (1) not helping, people still have cookies. It's also (2) annoying absolutely everyone every day, with up to four "fuck off" buttons users need to click per page load, and (3) actively hurting via huge externalities, as described above.
Oh, and for extra bonus on a weekly basis I run into websites that chose to simply block users from EU IPs, presumably after a ROI calculation. Thanks, EU.
Are you in Europe?