… Which means that businesses are making ‘too much’ money on top to sink into such endeavors, no?

For the vendor (non-)consent thing - Consent-O-Matic provides an appropriate framework.

(Whether such a side would even care about the preference/consent is another matter entirely - I’d suggest a throwaway browser identity and cookie auto delete for a start, anyway.)

Creating rules has a bit of a learning curve the first three or seven times, but I find that more interesting to do than go through a hostile/dark pattern cookie dialog or such the third time.

Hm, maybe the appropriate functionality from CoM could be re-wrapped as a TamperMonkey module…

Web automation for the masses 😱

12ft.io and/or archive.is/archive.today/… are worth trying in such cases (assuming you already have the latest version of the current ByPass addon, see the other comment).

Regarding cookie pop-ups, there’s a little known gem: https://consentomatic.au.dk/

Could also be the exact opposite (experienced this with consumer grade electronics based on microcontrollers often enough):

Because of the large capacitors, voltage from the power brick kinda “ramps up” when it is plugged into the wall. The device/its MCU/most specifically its clock circuit however prefers a hard edge of power being turned on, to reliably trigger its power on reset circuit/oscillator.

You can think of it similar to a pendulum/newton’s cradle/metronome - they also prefer one decisive push to get going reliably.

Unplugging the brick for a longer time is still worth a try, but it could also be this.

The ruling has been updated to say that accepting cannot be more convenient/streamlined/less clicks than rejecting, though.

Getting that enforced is another matter altogether, however.

There’s CookieAutoDelete (or anonymous tabs, containers, …) for the other side of this issue.

I “tried” to use XMPP/Jabber in its heyday, but in my experience (& memory) it never got to the point to have a “critical mass” of community (I felt to be part of / want to be part of).

Fediverse/Lemmy has this critical mass at least since some weeks now - unless too many of those users decide to leave for another place, I’m happy here no matter what other things get hyped in a given week.

Back in Jabber’s day, I would have liked to see it develop some communities as they did - and still do! - exist on IRC, but that simply never happened (with one I would both be interested in and could find).

You might also want to look into Zstandard - it gives much better ratios in orders of magnitude quicker time on modern hardware.

A bit down on the page you can find versions of the 7-zip graphical archive manager extended with this Zstandard algorithm.

Like normal 7-zip/traditional zip/rar/gzip/bz2/…, Zstandard is completely (guaranteed) lossless.

(I don’t really know about ECM at all, so I won’t speak on that aspect.)