> Third, normal decently behaved sites/operators obviously don't have cookie-banners at all. That is also a feature, it is an edge. If you see two sites for X one with a cookie-banner and one without it is clear as day which one you'd close and forget.
This is nonsense, there are plenty of legitimate reasons why a site operator may want to use digital analytics, advertising, etc.
There are plenty of scenarios where tracking is useful though. For example a product team may want to know how a particular segment of customers use their product vs a different segment.
Unless I am misunderstanding things rather deeply, I do not believe you need consent to track individuals' activity in your own app, with server-side logging.
You need consent to set cookies that are not relevant to the (user-side) functioning of your app/website—and since that's the only way for you to track users outside your own site (an oversimplification, but close enough), naturally you need it to track them beyond there.
> Unless I am misunderstanding things rather deeply, I do not believe you need consent to track individuals' activity in your own app, with server-side logging.
You would require consent for this as far as I understand.
This is nonsense, there are plenty of legitimate reasons why a site operator may want to use digital analytics, advertising, etc.