Do you feel like your comment is responding to mine in good faith and using the strongest plausible interpretation? Because it sure feels like you intentionally "misunderstood" it.

Obviously the intention is not "to not improve user privacy at all" but to give companies and users the agency to make their own choices. Many companies seems to chose "user inconvenience" over "user privacy", and it now makes it clear what companies made that choice. This is the intention of the directive.

I didn't intend to criticize your description of the situation. My intent was to criticize the people who (allegedly) had that goal, because it has become clear that the result of the policy was not to cause user frustration and have that lead to companies improving their privacy practices. Instead, the result of the policy was simply to increase user frustration without improving privacy practies.

Not the goal of the regulations. The goal of the companies.

Those are the same goals, at least in a capitalistic free market. The theory is that consumers will go towards products which are better (meaning, less obnoxious), and therefore the obnoxious websites will either die off or give up the banners to conform to the market.

Naturally, as you can see, free markets are purely theoretical. In practice, up and leaving a website you're using is almost never easy, and isn't even a choice you can make often.