After reading the article it’s not clear why this is a change to such a publicly stated policy. The only thing that has changed is that the directors have discretion to choose how many days in the office will be required for teams. The headline is extremely misleading.

Because they'd publicly sworn to SLU businesses that they were going to be dragging employees back.

If most French people agreed, then the government wouldn’t need to go after Amazon then would it? Consumers always vote with their purchases.

How are you supposed to track that someone has consented if you disable tracking? I’m assuming that declining means you can’t use any form of storage.

"trackingEnabled: 0" does not require consent and lets you acknowledge

"consentId: abc134" then looking that up in or even "consentDenied: exact timestamp" could be used to identify a user so would require consent. I suspect lots of companies want to use the second so they can choose to bug you for [more] consent at a later date, or choose to interpret the first as not allowed in case bugging the user again enough times does get consent.

Cookies for functional purposes are allowed without consent.