Then that’s their issue.

As you might have noticed, this site we’re on doesn’t need to have a cookie banner.

Probably because it's financed by a billion dollar VC.

I'd be curious to know what kind of hardware it takes to run HN. I'd suspect it's something like a one-hand-number-of-fingers AWS instances to actually serve it, although storage for all the comments is probably not insignificant at this point.

Not like it is impossible to show ads without cookies.

It is probably impossible to find an ad network that doesn't use cookies.