Cookie control should have been part of the browser UI all along rather than the responsibility of individual sites. Then you could have a global “allow all” or “deny all” setting or site-level control.
But browser vendors dropped the ball because they make a lot of money selling ads that exploit cookies. The EU had the power and could have simply ordered Google and Microsoft to implement cookie settings in their browsers, but they blew it.
It was, first with P3P and then with DNT, and adtech undermined these every time. Back when P3P has been supported in IE, Google used a deliberately bogus P3P header to bypass it. Google has also been fined for abusing a loophole in Safari's 3rd party cookie protection to bypass it. Google will not take your browser's "No" for an answer.
AdTech just doesn't want cookie consent to be easy, because they know it would kill their tracking business. The popups are intentionally cumbersome and annoying to make people associate privacy with annoyance, so that people will be tired of them, and give up on demanding privacy.
AdTech might care now. When a good technology exists to do this from the user agent side, the EU might force them to comply.
The EU likes standards to problems the market won't solve (see: mandatory USB-C), especially if the market has been given more than enough time to adapt.
I can see Mozilla starting an initiative for such a protocol, Apple falling in line because it doesn't extract ad money from its users (yet), and regulators responding. DNT is too crude a tool for tracking purposes, but I can see a popup with simple defaults and a P3P like protocol as something the EU might just force companies to comply with.
The EU recognized that cookies are only one way to track you and so made a law that requires informed consent for all kinds of tracking. Most tracking cannot be simply blocked by the browser because it happens entirely on the servers.
People like you being mad at the GDPR is exactly what the advertisers want to achieve by making needlesly annoying consent banners.
But browser vendors dropped the ball because they make a lot of money selling ads that exploit cookies. The EU had the power and could have simply ordered Google and Microsoft to implement cookie settings in their browsers, but they blew it.