The banners are inherently dark patterns. Non-essential cookies could be enabled via a configuration menu opened by the user at a time of their choosing. But e

The banners are inherently dark patterns. Non-essential cookies could be enabled via a configuration menu opened by the user at a time of their choosing. But everybody knows no user is going to do that, particularly unprompted. So they create a pop-up banner to do both the prompting and the configuration. And everybody knows most users, when they see a pop-up, are just looking for the sequence of button presses needed to remove the pop-up. So they make sure that that's "enable all cookies" because they know if it's "only enable essential cookies" vanishingly few users will enable non-essentials. Why would they? If everything non-essential were required to be inactive by default I think the pop-ups would disappear entirely. There'd be no point to them because vanishingly few users would ever change the defaults.