[ndr]

It's not (just) GDPR and TFA mentions that as soon as they move on from Cookies, ie point 2 on local storage:

"This buys you nothing. Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive".

They clearly have a product to sell but the article seems balanced and offers a good list of commonly used/proposed techniques that are not quite compliant.

As you alluded, there're more lawful basis than consent, one of most common ones being technical necessity to mitigate abuse.

[ptx]

Right, but even if you have a lawful basis for processing the data to collect aggregate statistics (which the article mentions), the GDPR still doesn't allow you to process the data for unrelated purposes such as advertising, which is usually what cookie banners are about. If you're using cookies strictly to implement the expected functionality of the service, there's no problem to begin with - you don't need any banners in that case.