I can tell you, with absolute certainty, that nobody knows how to implement the law or what it even means, legislators, lawyers, engineers alike. There was a good somewhere and now we're in hell.

Nah, companies don't want to implement it as it's bad for their business model so they feign ignorance.

I still remember being at an all hands at a former employer where the team presenting the revised cookie banners promoted as a benefit that it had opt in rates that would make an authoritarian dictator embarrassed to claim as uninfluenced

As someone who was helping to implement GDPR for clients when it took effect, it was a nightmare. We didn’t know exactly what to do, or when, or where, or to whom. The easiest solution for a lot of the implantations was “do the most so we don’t miss something, and pull back bits as we know more”.

You're right in the sense that it tends to be hard to understand things when your salary depends on you not understanding them. This seems to describe most web developers from the number of non-compliant consent popups in the wild.