The problem is that I spend hours explaining the actual technical nature of what we're doing to the legal team and I feel that there's often some kind of breakdown in communication because they don't understand the underlying technologies as well as the engineers do. And I haven't had this experience at one company, I've had it at multiple companies, several of which folks in this thread will have heard of.

To put a finer point on some of this, in one instance, I was writing an application that would allow our customers to deploy their own website with content that they had created through the tool that my company had provided. My company wasn't adding any tracking whatsoever to these pages. We were simply taking their content, rendering it properly, and hosting it for them. We ended up enforcing a cookie banner on these pages because the lawyers couldn't guarantee that there wouldn't be tracking content on that page that was added by the customers. But the end result is that every page, the vast majority of which don't have any tracking, still have cookie banners.

In essence, the law created a new legal hazard, and people aren't sure when they're going to run into it, so they end up putting up fences all over the place. Between this and malicious compliance, the end user experience has suffered greatly.