It's not tightly bound to cookies in any way.

And vastly misunderstood.

There was a predecessor which was somehow tied to cookies but even then you didn't need to ask for setting purely functional cookies.

But somehow everyone ended up interpreting it as such.

Maybe because most sites don't have many purely functional cookies or fingerprinting, as they always track you for other purposes, too.

There would be a "keep cookies for this site" button somewhere near the address bar, and at each login, the browser would also ask you if you want to save your password and/or save cookies for that domain.

99% of websites don't require persistant storage, and those who do, 99% of them are sites you're logged into and already prompt the user, asking if they want to save the password.