Nice extension. But I'd say that the legislation is alright, it's these sites that are terrible. They put these modals because they want to.

The legislation has the right heart, but its wording is problematic and leaves up too much on interpretation, so most sites who technically wouldn't need it just default to a cookie banner to be 'on the safe side'.

Combine that with the zealots (I've had an user complain about the absence of a cookie banner on a site that clearly did not need one), them potentially becoming a lawsuit initiator, and you got the mess you have now.

Writing good laws without unintended consequences is hard.

Yes. Moreover this law, while good intentioned, seems like a somewhat misplaced effort against tracking. Cookie tracking is easy to disable and not really worrysome. The elephant on the room is google play services tracking all android users with no way to disable it. Now, that should be forbidden by law.

GDPR's consent requirements are actually about tracking in general, regardless of the method you use to achieve it, not about cookies.

The wording of the GDPR is very clear: cookies required for essential functionality such as logging in or shopping carts do not require consent.

Not needed if you use uBlock Origin

That's not what I see. With uBlock Origin installed, if I visit news.bbc.co.uk, for example, I still get the accept cookies banner.

There are extra lists you need to enable. I believe the "annoyances" lists cover this.