There are a bunch of different kinds of payment gateway integrations, with various tradeoffs.
However a common pattern, at least at the time, was to use an iframe with the payment form in it.
Our form was multi page, and used cookie based sessions to track state between pages, so when they started being blocked, the payment form stopped working for safari users. The solution we chose at the time was to put the session id into the URL, but that has it's own security issues. There are other ways to address that particular issue that don't involve cookies, but would have required a significant rewrite of the system.
Some potentially legitimate ongoing use cases for 3rd party cookies, would be remembering payment details, and one click checkout across various sites that use the same payment gateway.
It should also be noted that these popups are likely not legal (or rather, they probably don't constitute informed consent under the the GDPR), but that's a completely different discussion to be had.