@sinbad same. There's literally no legitimate need for cookies beyond tracking. Sessions have been around for decades and make way more sense from every security and privacy perspective. They just don't work well for cross-site data sharing... i.e. tracking. 🙄
There's even local storage, if data really needs storing client-side. Works the same as cookies but as RAM for JS, rather than ROM, and inaccessible by other sites.
"Essential cookies required for functionality" is a straight up lie.