This is correct. Bad UX with modal popups and very ambiguous/deliberately vague verbose language designed to make you click some ok button are a choice not a le

This is correct. Bad UX with modal popups and very ambiguous/deliberately vague verbose language designed to make you click some ok button are a choice not a legal requirement. Being deliberately obnoxious is of course a weird choice if you are trying to actually get people to engage with your website. The more obnoxious the UX, the less you should trust websites to do the right things when it comes to your privacy and rights. If someone puts a "reject all" button in the cookie thing, I click it on principle. Every time. I go out of my way to find it and click it. The harder websites try to hide that button, the harder I try to find it and click it. It's usually there. But you have to wade through a lot of bullshit and deal with some offensively stupid UX to get to that button. I'm not going to mico-manage all the various ways you want to sell my data / abuse me. Does anyone actually do that? The engagement on UI like that must be absolutely terrible. What does that say about your brand if you are trying to be deliberately misleading, manipulative, and offensive like that? It's not a good look. Advertising your web design incompetence and malice/corporate stupidity like that is a choice. A bad and odd choice. But it's a choice. The more visually offensive the cookie experience, the less likely I am to provide consent and the more annoyed I get. It's that simple. Maybe I'm weird. Or maybe lots of people are exactly like me and don't provide consent either. So why even bother with this level of abuse? I also have an ad blocker (I don't even remember the web before ad blockers), I use firefox containers, and firefox cleans up cookies and blocks trackers really aggressively. So, not only is this stupid. It's also futile.