You forgot an alert confirmation dialog at the bottom...

There were three confirmation dialogs. Two of which we can blame the developers/company [1], one we can blame the EU’s good intentions but terrible execution idea.

[1] being prompted for alerts and making an account on first visiting a content site is so dumb, not to mention layering 3x modals, but some alert prompting by the OS/browser is fine

Developers partially share the blame for cookie dialogs as well. They could choose not to use cookies, knowing the alternative is an annoying dialog, but they choose to go the path of annoyance.

That cookie scenario is pretty unrealistic. I don’t think that decision has ever happened on a news site or any serious online business. This was entirely predictable that it would just be something people learn to click okay automatically without even reading it and it’s never geofiltered either. It’s a Windows approach to ‘privacy’ (annoying alerts replacing carefully timed messaging) that does little to influence decision making.