Sites work much better if you just say yes to everything. Devs never test the 'no' path as well, and half the time you'll find embedded videos/maps/tweets won't display or are buggy.
Since I care about a fast efficient web experience far more than I care about leaving digital footprints around, I choose the extension that says yes to everything.
I'm more or less in your camp. I really don't care about "saying no to cookies" because I don't believe that sites will implement no properly anyway. I'd much rather be relying on the clear (hopefully!) lines being drawn by my browser and its settings.
Asking me if I'd like to allow various cookies is by far the least important part of the problem. Relying in the cooperative efforts of site owners? Really?
Why answer the question at all? I use uBlock Origin's cosmetic filters to simply delete the prompt from the page. I nether accept nor decline, and I've never run into problems with this.
Have you ever tried booking flights with EasyJet? Their web servers would just literally stop sending you TCP packets once they see a session cookie that hasn't accepted the cookie consent within a minute or so. Took me a while to figure this out, and until I realised it's caused by me not seeing the cookie consent modal, my workflow was to clear cookies and then try to book the flight within 60 seconds. :-D
I've had no luck blocking YouTube's consent popup with uBlock Origin. From what I remember, it would randomize the element ID and also add a load delay, and if you managed to block it, it would block comments from loading or break scroll etc. With Consent-O-Matic, it works just fine.
I don't think I've ever seen a website that broke when I clicked "decline", or "disable all+save".
(Yes, I manually click or click click for every website. Also I don't think that EU "broke the internet", rather they made me painfully aware that every f.in website uses cookies and other tracking methods just to give my browsing history to ~300 total random company for no reason.)
Consent-O-Matic does not reject all cookies - it responds intelligently and automatically to the cookie consent dialogs and selects only essential cookies.
If someone says a cookie is non-essential and rejecting it results in their site not working that’s on them - a human might manually choose to reject it, it’d be the same end result.
Since I care about a fast efficient web experience far more than I care about leaving digital footprints around, I choose the extension that says yes to everything.