My company puts the cookie banner everywhere and follows the "hiding the banner is not consent" pattern.

Not because we're required, but because that's how the off the shelf cookie banner thing we use works, and better safe than sorry should a European access our US marketing site, i suppose.

I always figured most of the popups would reject cookies if hidden, if for no other reason that everyone is too lazy to modify the default behavior (and the default behavior is designed for EU regulations)

The law for cookie and privacy consent is (afaik) applicable to any EU citizen or resident, even if they are not currently located in the EU. That means if you do business in the EU, you have to show the banner for everybody because you cannot know if they are an EU citizen/resident from their IP alone.