EDIT: I didn't realize the anger this would bring out of people. It was supposed to be a funny meme based on recent real-life situations I've encountered, not an attack on the EU.
I appreciate the effort of the EU cookie laws. The practice of them just doesn't live up to the theory of the law. Shady companies are always going to find a way to be shady.
That's gotta be quite some website you visited, if it didn't load at all without cookies. As someone from Germany, who mostly rejects every sites cookies, except for the essential ones most of the time, but sometimes outright rejects all cookies, I've never encountered a website that refused to load upon doing that.
Not defending any webpages that do do that, just contributing my personal experience.
Also: this for chrome or this for fiefrerfx
Also from Germany. Some american news and media sites do that.
https://www.oekotest.de/
https://www.pcwelt.de/
https://www.saechsische.de/
https://www.wetter.com/
All don't offer cookie rejection.
Makes sense, I don't use any of them, at all. I'm pretty sure there's a place where you can report such webpages for doing that though, though I don't know where at the moment.
Edit: possibly this one
Netzpolitik.de checked Germany's top 100 sites. Not many offer a single click rejection of cookies. Many of them only offer a paid 'pure abo' to disable tracking.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/9GFZM/8/ (German)
Yea, we have the same issue in Austria but technically that's illegal behaviour and you should be able to report it somewhere!
Don't know if it's me or what, but I clicked on the first link and when it opened in my mobile browser, everything started shaking vertically like the page was suffering an earthquake. I'll definitely have to look into that because I've never seen it happen before on any website like it.
I've seen Italian sites that will put up a pay wall if you refuse the cookies.
some other just block access from the eu completely. (not a news site, but applebee's does this)
Consent-o-matic is magnificent.
One extension to automatically accept, one extension to automatically delete everything after the tab is closed.
It's rare to see (probably since someone pointed out it doesn't conform to GDPR standards), but I ran into a batch of them in short order recently, so it's been on my mind.
I exit in the EU a lot. Same, they mostly work fine with no cookies. It's much more common to see one that just doesn't let EU residents in.