Well, there was an effort to solve it on a technological level, via the Do Not Track header (DNT). The idea was that when users actively signal they don’t want to be tracked, then even in weaker jurisdictions, you can’t justify doing it anyways.

But Google and Facebook said outright that they would not honor DNT, which meant virtually no webpages could honor it, since Google Analytics and the Facebook Like-button were omnipresent on the web at that point.
And then Microsoft killed it off for good by enabling it by default in Internet Explorer. That meant the DNT header did not anymore necessarily represent a user actively choosing to not be tracked, so it became meaningless in court.

Well, and after that had failed, the EU came about with the GDPR to solve it with laws.
But here it also needs to be said that a cookie banner is effectively only required, if you implement tracking.^[1]
But of course, the ad industry did not want webpage owners to realize they could avoid needing a cookie banner by removing ads or going for non-tracking ads, so they spread a whole bunch of FUD.

And now we’re here, with cookie banners virtually everywhere, which are often not even GDPR-compliant either (like the PC Gamer cookie banner here), since it’s supposed to be just as easy to decline, as it is to accept. If it is not, then that’s not legally consent, because consent has to be freely given.

TL;DR: Ad industry bad.