That is the most egregious cookie popup I've seen. The worst part is it's not immediately obvious what an indifferent user has to click on quickly get rid of it, necessitating reading and thinking.
"Hey, waait a minute! Is the article trolling me with a 'difficult problem' here? which I will now proceed to take a long time to 'solve'? because I'm 'intelligent'? well, screw you, troll - I can solve this quickly!", and so, I hastily clicked on something in order to make the popup go away.
The popup does actually feel like a good illustration of the basic phenomena. Average person says "oh look, a cookie popup" and clicks through, possibly choosing randomly between "confirm" and "select all". (People with lower familiarity with cookie popups or the language might get completely stuck)
HNer isn't at all intimidated by the wall of text and knows exactly what it mean but reads every word to check they haven't snuck any particularly egregious privacy violations and goes down the rabbit hole of evaluating the likely implications of blocking 'necessary' cookies and the virtues of doing that via the cookie popup or browser plugin before making their selection...
Are you complaining about the lack of dark patterns that push you to accept all cookies? When that cookie banner opened for me, I thought "finally, one of the moral ones" because all the non essential cookies are turned off by default, and you have two options with the same visual weight to either accept or reject the others.
Have you seriously never seen a worse one? Because compared to 99% of all cookie popups I know this one's extremely user friendly. It's the second best variant after the ones explicitly showing an identically styled "reject all" button.
My only complaint is the selection looking like a link (colored/underlined), which my brain associates with GET, which should not change state, but a change of state is required to store the cookie preference.
Could we please get an ISO for usability, and regulation that requires compliance?
It's the best one I've ever seen. Completely free of dark patterns (except maybe the fact that "Select All" and "Confirm Selection" are arguably the wrong way round) and literally the only one I've encountered where I could reject all but necessary cookies with a single click. All the non-essential ones are off by default, and they're not advertising ones anyway.
THEN I stopped, and thought:
"Hey, waait a minute! Is the article trolling me with a 'difficult problem' here? which I will now proceed to take a long time to 'solve'? because I'm 'intelligent'? well, screw you, troll - I can solve this quickly!", and so, I hastily clicked on something in order to make the popup go away.
Thus proving that I'm not intelligent.
I win.