This seems like a design decision on Drive and not an evil plot to hold your files hostage.

To make it work again, you can enable third party cookies exclusively for drive.google.com. Every modern browser will let you do this per-site, and if you change settings like this, I guess you should expect to do some manual tweaking once in a while.

It appears the specific cookie blocking downloads is from googleusercontent.com and not a random 3rd party. I set my browser to allow session cookies from this domain and it allowed me to download my files.

Good solution. But not for inexperienced users. They'll just enable everything to get their files. Google is doing great job for tracking companies (like Google itself).

Isn't the Chrome team pushing to drop 3rd party cookies altogether as discussed a couple of days back, with many HN participants voicing fears that it will cripple the ad industry outside Google?