I agree; if you do not want cookies then you can just disable it in the client, and if you do not want it to load third-party scripts or images, then you should disable that, and so on; the cookie warnings and all of that stuff is not helpful.
(Perhaps a better requirement would be to require the browser distributors to include warning labels about such features if they are done automatically.)
That is not quite what I meant. What I meant is independent of opt-in or opt-out, but is rather saying that such features in the browser should be and must be configurable, and that is separate from the issue of consent. (Maybe they should be disable third party cookies by default, or whatever, but it will work either way.)
What they will do with the data you give to them, is a separate issue than the web browser. The company you are dealing with still needs to have a proper policy for that, but that is different than the issue of the client configuration.
Requiring a warning message about cookies on the web page is not helpful, because that is the wrong place to put it; the browser can provide its own such warning, and the user can configure it. (Lynx provides the possibility to ask when a cookie is received.)
So, the actual problem is the browser providers designing them stupid, and making them such complicated that it is difficult to make up a new one which is actually good.
(Perhaps a better requirement would be to require the browser distributors to include warning labels about such features if they are done automatically.)