I mean, I want cookies on lots of sites... like any one that I login to. How else are they supposed to track access to my account?

That's fine under the EU cookie law, no popup for permission required.

I know. I was just replying to the commenter who said "no one wants cookies"

That would be me. I was using cookies in the context of "cookies that cause popups to appear", because the other kind of cookies are useful and don't annoy people.

Couldn’t that happen from your side?

Indeed! Someone should make a browser API that lets services direct the user agent to set domain-scoped key value pairs that are passed back to the service on subsequent requests. That would let the client automatically prove that they're authenticated while maintaining the server-side statelessness.

That sounds like the old Unix 'magic cookies'.. maybe we should call the things 'cookies'!

Obviously no. What it would make it different than another user accessing the same account then?

HTTP is stateless so, no.

Cookies save me from having to log into every site every time I want to use a service. That is more important to me than not allowing cookies due to some conspiracy-theorist reason.

What I might not want is cookies from OTHER sites like Google being set and/or accessed by non-Google sites. But having worked at web startups, I know firsthand how important google analytics were, so I don’t know.

> Cookies save me from having to log into every site every time I want to use a service

GDPR allows that, and you don't need consent, only disclosure, and you don't need an ugly cookie-bar.