Meta & co are required by US law to do the same for people in the rest of the world. Didn't see a huge US outcry about that, in fact I saw a lot of hate for things like GDPR
The hate for the GDPR I read of is actually about the "allow cookie" popups that aren't needed at all are are just a form of protest by those individual sites because they are storing and selling personal information including IP addresses.
If you aren't engaged in those practices then there's no need for any GDPR annoyances for users.
The allow cookies was already there because of the cookie banner law, unfortunately GDPR did not stop the cookie law, but GDPR does say you need a way to agree to tracking etc. and to be informed when it happens so it sort of seems reasonable the allow cookies popups would be used for this.
