There are plenty of things that you cannot consent to under various circumstances. As an extreme example you cannot freely give consent to become a slave no mat

There are plenty of things that you cannot consent to under various circumstances. As an extreme example you cannot freely give consent to become a slave no matter how much you would like to (except by going to prison in a certain well known country north of Mexico, I suppose). In many cases you cannot consent to intimate acts with authority figures (e.g. boss, teacher, prison guards). I think in the case of the GDPR the desire was for consumers to be able to make a choice about their data, but such a choice would be meaningless if websites were allowed to make a "click here to consent, or here to close this browser tab" popup, and the "cookie law" shows that this likely the approach that 95%+ of websites would have taken. The cookie popups have shown quite clearly the balance of power between consumers and websites: website owners know consumers will get the exact same deal (accept or fuck off) everywhere else, so the consumers have no real power in this "negotiation". The definition of "freely given" consent in the context of the GDPR was probably written the way it is to correct for this power imbalance.