Before cookie banners were required, do you think the average user would have any idea how many sites were tracking them? I don't think they did. It's beneficial if only to increase public awareness, because tracking is otherwise invisible.
Heck, I'm a reasonably technical user, and I wouldn't have noticed in most cases. Again, invisible. Now I have a negative first impression of a site if it annoys me with cookie banners, and a more positive one if not.
Except now it feels like a California Prop 65 warning that you see on literally every business. “Something in here may cause cancer. Is it a bottle of toilet cleaner locked in the supply closet? Is it benzene in the hummus? Who knows!”
It doesn't change the fact that they're tracking me, it just makes me click an "X" or "OK" every damned time I visit some new site to read an article or something.
I could understand your argument if sites were actually removing tracking in order not to annoy users with the popup.
But sites aren't doing that, not in any meaningful number at all. So it's not having any effect on privacy, while annoying basically every internet user ever constantly (before you hunt for an extension to block as many of them as you can).
So I don't see how it's a good move at all, not in practice. It's just annoying, and that's it.