Internet's biggest annoyance: Cookie laws should target browsers, not websites

While we're talking about cookies, can anyone explain what legitimate interest is? And if it's an exception to consent then why can I reject legitimate interest? It just seems like another hurdle to rejecting all non essential cookies.

Legitimate interest as interpreted by most companies making (IMO non-compliant) cookie dialogs as just a second attempt at consent that they think doesn’t have to obey the top level reject all they’ve finally been penalised into having.

Legitimate Interest per the law is intended for use cases like, having a list of people who owe you money, or keeping IP address access metrics long enough to use them for anti bot or paywall measures.