The lawmakers regulated that a website should warn you, and then upgraded to ask for your consent, before collecting and storing privately identifiable information about you.
The regulation doesn't mention cookie popups. The easiest way to comply is to not collect nor store any such information.
Governments don't think in terms of utopia, but the rest is literally what a government is: here are the rules, you will follow them or get punished.
Relying on self-interest is Laissez-faire, that had the result of (1) the invention of communism and (2) basically ended even in the US with the Great Depression.
Communism kinda had the same problem, as it made false assumptions about human nature and self-interest.
If you're a site that has even basic analytics reporting requirements, how do you do any of that without?
"Don't do these things" is a decent option for sole traders, microbusiness and hobby website operators, but good luck selling that to anyone "in a suit" (more likely $500 jeans or chinos nowadays).
That is why we should do proper enforcement. Cookie popup that is not needed 1% revenue fine for each month it stays up. Suits will start to understand things really really fast.
Once again, there is no law requiring cookie popups. Gathering data fairly and transparently (e.g. login credentials) is perfectly fine. However if you wish to pass my data to third parties to track me (advertisers take a bow) then you need my explicit opt-in permission to do so. And so you should.
This isn't difficult to understand and has been law in the UK and EU for quite some time now.
The regulation doesn't mention cookie popups. The easiest way to comply is to not collect nor store any such information.