This is ad companies dragging their heels and making the UX as bad as possible. It's clearly a good tactic because you're now blaming the EU instead of the ones tracking your every move.
Cookies is just one of many things covered by the regulation that requires consent. Browser fingerprinting or local storage is another one.
Blocking cookies by itself will not do anything against tracking, nor will it remove the need for consent prompts because they still need consent for the aforementioned non-cookie tracking methods.
Because certain technologies are not vulnerabilities per-se. Cookies and local storage can both be used for good as well as for evil - the browser can't magically guess the intention behind a cookie or a local storage API call.
Similar to the real-world, there are a lot of things that can be used for good as well as for evil. A car can be used for transportation but can also be used to run people over; this doesn't mean we're just going to ban all cars or make them non-functional because otherwise some people might use them to hurt others - we rely on laws to prevent misuse instead.
I don't know why you're being downvoted; you're absolutely correct. Or perhaps not "needed", but without cookies your experience on the web is going to be crap. Repeatedly entering your language preference, viewing first visit tutorials, ironically seeing the cookie banners on every visit (unless you block them), having to log back into sites like Amazon, Netflix and gmail on every visit, etc. etc. Cookies (or some form of local storage) are extremely useful.
On the contrary. I love it, because now it is illegal for me to be tracked without my consent (and my not clicking on decline is not consent), which is why American news sites block EU IPs because they can't just data mine me without my knowledge.
But it could have been solved so much better, for example via the browser using the same UI as the location tracking. Then again we already have that with the "do not track" flag and that doesn't really work without real consequences.
Lets imagine the EU making a law that has nothing about cookies, but instead focus on personal data and when it may be collected and when it may not be collected. The law may not even need to mention cookies except as one of many examples, like a radio frequency identification tag. The focus of the law can instead be about why someone is collecting personal data, and what the purpose is.
The law could say something like: If you are collecting data in order to create an profile of a person, and the person did not ask you to do a job which require such profiling, then you must ask for permission.
Nothing about cookies, nothing about a popup, just intention and consent. And here come the surprise. That is current GDPR. It mention cookies exactly once, as part of an non-exhausted example list of identifiers which is commonly used in order to profile people. Cookies has the same importance in GDPR as profiling a person based on what screen resolution your device has, and you may notice that there are no screen-resolution-accept-banners anywhere.
And in the meantime we have healthcare that doesn't bankrupt you if you need to go to the ER, affordable education, and better consumer protection laws among other things. Oh, and a police force that in average doesn't kill as many people as the US one does.
