I m not sure I follow your logic; are you saying that the regulation is not that bad because you are not fined enough if you don't follow it ? Some of us just follow regulations because it's the law - regardless of the fine. I feel like we should be allowed to express our opinion about their merits or shortcomings without considering the penalty aspect which is an entirely separate conversation.
I believe the point was the exact opposite: the regulation isn't enforced, which creates these absurd opt-out dialogue trees. If it were to be enforced fully, then anyone without a "reject all" button would be slapped with fines. Maybe even anyone who doesn't abide by the do not track/global privacy control headers.
Also businesses are not people. People may not do illegal things "just because they are illegal" or because they want to be "good" (e.g. I agree that we should not litter, I wouldn't even need a regulation for that).
Businesses are profit-maximising machines. If it it profitable to litter, a business will do it. The framework in which businesses maximise is set by regulations, which represent what society wants. That's how capitalism works.
The limit of capitalism is when businesses are more powerful than the entities in charge of enforcing the regulations. If "enforcing a regulation" means having lawyers work on it, but the businesses themselves have orders of magnitudes more lawyers trying to prevent those entities from doing their jobs, then we have a problem. That's a limit of capitalism, IMO.
I still believe that even with a reject all button, the regulation is absolute bullshit. The sheer fact that the regulation forbids that setting to be done at the browser level (the law specifically mentions that the consent - or rejection - has to be specific for each website and thus cannot be "once and forget"), is absolute dogshit.
I turn out to be the CTO of a mid-sized SAAS business (100+ FTE over 3 continents), and neither I, any legal advisor, or any other C-level that I have ever met are discussing "what's the fine ? should we just pay instead of complying ?" when dealing with legal stuff. I do not know who brainwashed you into thinking that all businesses are just gonna disregard any regulation given the chance but that has not been my experience at all. I am not saying that none are doing it, but this really isn't the norm. The whole "people = good, business = bad" is just some kind of cozy metal construction that fits in a TikTok video, but that not how the world works.
