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my cynical half is thinking they said, "well if all these other ways to track you online exist what the hell let's roll back cookies to look good for the privacy-concerned set." this seems like just privacy theatre based marketing. maybe github is actually being good here though, who knows?
The laws (GDPR and the so called "cookie law") do not say anything about cookies specifically, so tracking users in other ways that still identify them similarly while not being necessary would still require the banner and consent.
it depends if you use a cookie to track individual visitors but do so by generating a hash and saving it into a database that is legal. if you save something along that hash, which would identify somebody or some kind of hash based on browser/ip, that would be illegal.

btw. ip addresses still needs to be saved by german means (when users can log in), since if you are a big service you need to give authorities the identity to your users, if they made something illegal. it's really really wierd.

Add the same time, IP addresses or generally user identity are GDPR radioactive waste, so one needs all the sophisticated measures to handle that.
its basically authorities > privacy > corporate greed
And would still be illegal in the ways Web sites that try to hide behind "consent" banners are.
to be cynical, github is simply the friendly dev facing arm of Microsoft. and they will be friendly only as long as MS is trying to win more developers over.
And we all know how Microsoft enjoys its mandatory data exfiltration, particularly towards developers (WSL mandates full Windows 10 telemetry, for example).
I particularly enjoyed how some of the privacy toggles would appear to work but not actually persist their state when reloaded. That was the last straw; I replaced the network card with something Linux-compatible, threw on Gentoo, and haven't looked back.
And the increasingly-dark patterns, appearing with every new Feature Update, to trick the user into allowing Microsoft to siphon off yet more data. I jumped ship once Windows 7 reached EOL as I saw this coming years prior :-\
Wish I'd had you to consult way back then :)