I think that if you are geolocated in the US then it tries to automatically enable all of the evil cookies, but in Europe there are big buttons presented to Accept or Reject cookies.
Apparently, you need to not only have a one-time choice, but have the ability to change your cookie preferences at any time. There are many ways to implement that feature, but “a cute little cookie icon is always present” is one of them. It it didn’t obscure Discourse buttons that get used a lot, it wouldn’t be a problem, either.
Yes, and in an ideal world that would be best implemented in the “Preferences” options in your profile. But, again, Discourse having outsourced cookie management to a third party, this is probably a hard thing to integrate.