Unfortunately, not in a business context, where marketers can claim "legitimate interest" in various ways. Also, in which way would it matter that they are illegal? Random companies keep sending them anyway; there are virtually no legal repercussions here.
Yes, I mean cold sales emails – marketers reaching out to CEOs or other decision makers, selling them staff augmentation services, growth hacking, marketing support, lead generation, design services, etc. They'd claim legitimate interest by "personalizing" the email and claiming that it is relevant for you in a business sense. (Anyway, I don't think that these are fully compliant with GDPR either, because most often, they will have scraped your email address from somewhere, and do not provide a way to unsubscribe.)
I think that they’re as illegal as they are in the US, not more. I think it’s perfectly fine to “cold-call” people but then you’re not allowed to send more emails unless they subscribe or respond.
In reality it’s very easy to end up subscribing to newsletters and even my European embassy subscribed me to their event newsletter in Thailand—of course I never agreed to any of that.
That’s not accurate. If your email is on your website, of course they can email you. If what you said was true in absolute terms, communication would be impossible.
They can contact you for legitimate reasons, which could be "hey, your website has content from me that is copyrighted" they can't contact you for sales reasons without your consent.