Yes, consent fatigue is real and nobody likes these cookie banners. Which is also the exact reason why I think they are important. Making tracking visible to the user is the point. It creates an actual "cost" for tracking by forcing websites to actively ask the user to consent. The moment you hide it in a one-time set-and-forget browser setting is the moment when informed consent dies, tracking becomes invisible, and accountability disappears.
We are also looking at very perverse incentives here: Who controls the biggest browsers? Google's Chromium is basically the engine behind 80% of the browser market right now. Apple and Microsoft aren't exactly neutral parties either. Google is an advertising company, and Apple and Microsoft still have a huge interest in data. The idea that you should trust these parties to implement a "simple" consent system that runs counter to their business model is... optimistic, to put it mildly.
You would also have to trust websites to accurately categorize their cookies. If your cookie preferences are a set-and-forget setting in your browser, are you sure that random website you just visited didn't declare Google Analytics as "essential" for their website to work? Are you going to check?
The blog post also assumes cookie preferences are universal, but perhaps I'm okay with analytics on a random tech blog but absolutely not on a website about medical issues.
The funniest part: The "Do Not Track" signal already exists, and it failed spectacularly. The post even mentions it. DNT was supposed to be exactly this simple, browser-level signal. And websites just ignore it.
Sidenote:
> Imagine if every time you got into your car, you had to manually approve the engine's use of oil, the tires' use of air, and the radio's use of electricity. It’s absurd, right? You’d set your preferences once, and the car would just work.
Yes, absurd. Except that's more or less happening with different features. Every time I start my car, I need to manually disable the speed limit warning because it's annoying, and the lane keep assist because I feel like it is overly aggressive and sometimes genuinely dangerous. Also, the analogy is exceptionally weak. The author compares mechanical necessities (oil, air) with optional data extraction. That's hardly the same thing. Cookies required for basic functionality of websites is usually enabled by default. A more appropriate equivalent would be a popup by the car's dealership asking you to track everywhere you drive, and how fast, and if you looked at some billboards along the way.