> Some websites, especially small ones operated outside of the EU, simply don't care about their obligations under European law. What about lobster.rs?

Such as HN? Honest question, for all I know they're breaking EU law and nobody cares. Or maybe they don't.

Anyway, pouet.net doesn't have one. It links to a ton of group sites, many European, try to count the ones that don't have a cookie banner.

For fun, I did a quick and dirty test on the HN front page at the time of this comment, out of 30 links, I counted 11 cookie banners. Let's say I missed a few (a bunch of the ones I counted were a small bar at the top or the bottom, easy to miss, not even sure if they blocked the page), let's say it's 20 out of 30. One third of all websites is still a huuuuuuge amount of websites.

I took privacy seriously before I "had to". So for me, nothing changed. Why would it? You can have a link in the footer to opt into tracking. If actually "value consent" and all that. It's a complete non-issue for most sites that have banners, they could just stop being creeps and it'd be fine. But they don't want to stop, they want to annoy users as much as legally possible and then funnel the annoyance at the laws protecting those users against them.

"Have you heard about this new thing, you have to wear something around your ankle and can't be a school teacher and stuff like that? Yeah it's really insane, how will children learn anything, ever again?"

"Wait, what are you even talking about? Have you done something?"

Of course there's corner cases, of course this can also be a hassle for sites that aren't "creeps". But generally? The same generic false claims, over and over? Just no.