A technical answer might be that they want to implement a policy to grant you free access to one article per week, and than demand payment to access more than t

A technical answer might be that they want to implement a policy to grant you free access to one article per week, and than demand payment to access more than that, and a cookie is simple way to do that (yes, easy to circumvent, but that’s pretty uninteresting from a legal sense) I don’t think GDPR demands “consent” for this though.