My experience is that customers don't even want a reject option, and that pricing is not really part of the question.

pricing correlates to 0.95 with poorly managed cookies in my anecdotal experience. Customers don't even know what all that means, they just want a cheap, functioning website.

Yes, and most consumers outside the tech space just want to access the content. 95% of my friends have no clue what a cookie is - they just press the green button and get on with their shopping. It's not an education issue either - they just don't particularly care.

Exactly - and the regulators thought of this. The obvious/simple/default option MUST be the one that protects the users information the most, or the GDPR is violated.

The law is written understanding that users are lazy/ignorant/non-technical. Anything else would have been useless.

That's true. As long as they have not to bear the external cost it's cheap to pollute. But the market is two sided. We can bring the cost to the polluter if we choose to.

Just to hit on your [1] I've sold them for less.

Look I need money, you want me to track users at each step, record ip and browser information(and extra), and log that into a database even if you haven't hit submit? Okay.

I don't agree, but my son needs to eat. My day job sucks, I'm in a never ending spiral, I'll code anything you want. My passion is far gone.

If you disagree, I actually agree with you, it shouldn't be this way, but this isn't the net of the 90's, I need side cash and my son is hungry.

To summise, I'll break every rule, or find a work around necessary to keep my family up, and I hate it.

I love the internet, hell it made me who I am, but until browsers become serious about user security, it's not going to happen.