>Companies know they don't need those pop-ups. They are putting them there to anger you and demand for things to go back. Do you want to blame the EU for not anticipating that companies would act maliciously? Sounds fair to me. But don't let the companies off the hook for acting maliciously!

This gets repeated a lot. However, even one of the pages on the official site of the EU has a cookie banner:

https://commission.europa.eu/index_en

Is the EU itself acting maliciously in putting up that cookie banner?