In fairness, when I went to that site as an experiment, it did eventually appear to save my preferences. And in more fairness, go look at the list of cookies and especially under advertising. Yeah, that's a lot fucking bigger than it should be, and a minority allow opting out. But imagine the implementation in your head: you've probably got to make some web call (REST, WebSocket, whatever) for each one of those.

In summary, I could see how that might take a minute or two without a requirement for evil.