Not quite.

> This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out or facilitating the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order to provide an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user.

This is the reason why these are usually separated to "strictly necessary" and "functional" cookies. Functional cookies are things which enhance the functionality, but are not strictly necessary. These would generally include things like persistent cookie for language choice rather than just session one.

This gets repeated a lot, but is not my experience after having worked with both in-house and contracted lawyers to understand how functional cookies are handled. We end up wanting something more durable than session cookies to track user preferences so we can set them next time they visit. This is super standard light/dark mode, region, language type of stuff. But that's considered “tracking" in many of these discussions, which never made sense to me.

Yet every website still has them.