Excellent points, but the cookie banners were a response to the ePrivacy Directive, not GDPR. In fact the banners predate GDPR by about a decade! I know this because I decided to make my own banner that was slightly less annoying about five years before GDPR was a thing.

Funnily enough most of your points are still correct precisely because, as you say, "most people wholly equate GDPR with the cookie banners".