The concept of tracking as per the GDPR goes beyond cookies though. It includes any kind of personal data collection, and personal data refers to anything that can uniquely identify a person with reasonable certainty.

So cookies aren't the only thing that requires consent - things like browser fingerprinting and even collecting IP addresses for non-essential purposes (aka you can probably claim legitimate interest if you collect them for technical or fraud prevention reasons, but using that data for analytics or marketing would require consent).

This is also why I think clicking "accept all" on the cookie prompts with cookies disabled at the browser level isn't a good idea. You're still giving them permission to stalk you using other means than cookies, and they very well know that. At least use an ad-blocker which blocks the consent prompts completely - technically you never provided permission, so while they might still stalk you at least they don't have a legal basis for doing so.

The GDPR is less about the technical aspect of data collection and more about the intent behind said collection and the planned use for the collected data, something the browser can't really tell.

Yes, I remember this as a kid in the early IE days, like version 4 or something, not sure, but it was there.

TL;DR: Thanks Europe for fixing something almost nobody cared about, by making the internet worse for everyone and by forcing society as a whole to spend money building terrible UIs.

And in the end, people still just Accept All because it's the fastest way to content.