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.
