That's because those sites want to track you, for profit, and they usually want to confuse you into agreeing in the weakest way possible.
These popups are entirely unnecessary, if sites would just stop tracking you and allowing third parties to track you.
Yeah, who needs money to operate a service anyway. Can't they just be happy that I'm even willing to consume their content?! These websites do that so that they can provide the website in the first place. If they didn't then there would be no website for you to complain about.
Oh no, my business model of selling everything I can glean about you in exchange for some recycled 'content' is under threat! Oh noes!
If you can't operate without tracking and you can't legitimately and consensually persuade people to participate in it without resorting to dark patterns and hiding controls, your business is no longer viable, sorry. Find a new model or make way for someone else that can.
Given I have zero interest in seeing ads in the first place, this sounds like a 'you' problem.
I'm not trying to be snarky here - this idea that relevant ads are important to users seems to be some sort of industry delusion. Why should I care if the people trying to sell me stuff while I read a news article are less able to target me? The ads are already an attention-demanding annoyance, it hardly matters what they're for.
GDPR is the best "needle mover" in terms of "we don't care about xyz" in the last 15 years.
In a meeting, even as an external contractor, you can now much more easily highlight privacy/security issues without being told that you are "too caring", and it will actually have an impact (because there is a widely known law & control body).
If there is an annoying popup on a website it's not compliant. E.g. if you need to switch OFF multiple accept switches, then it's blatantly in violation (default must be off). I have no idea why sites would even bother putting up a noncompliant GDPR popup instead of just ignoring it.
Most GDPR implementations that are so annoying are actually wrong.
To me it's a stretch to say legislation ought to work like this.
Many of the "outlier good ideas" in legislation are those that integrate the facts on the ground and consider e.g. implementation complexity.
On top of that, there is a wide range given to the DPA which they are using. It is just that the EU agencies prefer to try to educate first before hitting companies hard, which makes sense.
In practice, if it had not been for Covid, the UK DPA would have killed multiple adtech company during the Summer. They had announced having planned it earlier this year.
The vast majority of those aren't GDPR-compliant, they're just attempts at paying lip-service while maintaining the old ways, and they're usually illegal.