You seem to be inverting cause and consequence: it's the websites who are annoying to the users, not the law. The banner is optional, it only exists because websites want to collect your private data, not even to make the thing work.
> Or the regulation could've been amended to clarify and improve the technical aspects.
The regulation has been clarified to mean something important: refusal must be as easy, visible and doable as acceptance, so people can click "refuse" everywhere. Lack of acceptance mean refusal, so people can close the banner.
> You seem to be inverting cause and consequence: it's the websites who are annoying to the users, not the law.
No, I mean that the law could've been written in a way that makes giving consent less cumbersome for users. I agree with GP: if it had been a browser setting that websites _must_ comply with, like the abused and now dead DoNotTrack header, then we wouldn't have ended up with annoying consent forms to begin with. After all, it does make sense for this to be a global user preference, rather than something the user needs to consent to on each site. Even without getting into technical details, this should be evident to anyone.
I'm not aware of why this didn't happen, or why the DNT header was killed, but it wouldn't surprise me if the (ad)tech industry strongly lobbied against it, and won. The internet loves to criticize this oversight as incompetence from politicians, but politicians couldn't have elaborated the technical aspects of the law without IT consultants, and these surely understood what could be the implications. The fact they went with the consent form approach, and the fact this hasn't been rectified years later, is probably a sign that the tech industry still has considerable sway in regulatory matters.
But to blame this situation on the law itself, or the EU, is just delusional. I'm still happy it exists, warts and all.
But nothing prevents browsers from doing so ! In fact you can even configure your browser to never show those popups, and everything is fine. Everytime I switch people over to Firefox I install ublock origin and the list that blocks cookie popups: https://jasonmurray.org/posts/2020/cookies/ (there are even more settings to block even more popups today)
Actually Google is seeing the wind turn and is slowly moving away from cookies, so it did even better than what you wanted: it will effectively kill (unnecessary) cookies as a whole.
I have no issue believing lawmakers did in fact take advices from IT experts, seeing how they could make the difference between useful and unuseful cookies. But the law never goes into implementation details, that's another level of regulation, and the real effect is coming: the major browser will block third-party cookies. That will change everything.
You seem to be inverting cause and consequence: it's the websites who are annoying to the users, not the law. The banner is optional, it only exists because websites want to collect your private data, not even to make the thing work.
> Or the regulation could've been amended to clarify and improve the technical aspects.
The regulation has been clarified to mean something important: refusal must be as easy, visible and doable as acceptance, so people can click "refuse" everywhere. Lack of acceptance mean refusal, so people can close the banner.