Cookie consent popovers were the deliberate decisions of company to create the worst possible compliance. A much simpler one could have been to stop tracking users especially when it is not their primary business.

Newer regulations also mandate that "reject all cookies" should be a one click action but surprisingly compliance is low. Once again, the enemy of the customer here is the company, not the eu regulation.

I don’t believe that every website has colluded to give themselves a horrible user experience in some kind of mass protest against the GDPR. My guess is that companies are acting in their interests, which is exactly what I expect them to do and if the EU is not capable of figuring out what that will look like then it is a valid criticism of their ability to make regulations

Yet that user interface is against the law and enforcing the GDPR would improve it.

Websites use ready-to be used cookie banners provider by their advertisers. Who have all the incentive to make the process as painful as possible unless you click "accept", and essentially followed the model that Facebook pioneered.

And since most people click on accept, websites don't really care either.

What makes you think the regulators didn't predict the outcome?

Of course the business which depend on harvesting data will do anything they can to continue harvesting data. The regulation just makes that require consent. This is good.

If businesses are intent to keep on harvesting data by using dark patterns to obtain "consent", these businesses should either die or change. This is good.

Perfect example of regulation shaping a market. And succeeding at only ill results.

So because sometimes a regulation misses the mark, governments should not try to regulate?

Well, pragmatically, I'd say no. We must judge regulations not by the well wishes and intentions behind them but the actual outcomes they have. These regulations affect people, jobs and lives.

The odds of the EU actually hitting a useful mark with these types of regulations, given their technical illiteracy, it's is just astronomically unlikely.

I think OP is criticising blindly trusting the regulation hits the mark because Meta is mad about it. Zuckerberg can be a bastard and correctly call out a burdensome law.

Bad argument, the solution is not to not regulate, it's to make a new law mandating companies to make cookies opt-in behind a menu that can't be a banner. And if this somehow backfires too, we go again. Giving up is not the solution to the privacy crisis.