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.