I think they mean they immediately know which button to press as in press the one that they're designing the pop-up around encouraging you not to press.

i.e. "that button is given far less emphasis and made less convenient to press, so it must be the good one."

I'd call that shitty. It's not that the design is good, it's that the above person has become so accustomed to navigating this shitty dark pattern that it has become ingrained in how they use computers.

Kinda like gaining the experience of knowing which download link is the real one on a website full of fake download buttons. The fact that we can pick out the real one with a moment's thought doesn't make that any less of a scummy design move.

Did you miss the words “dark pattern”? it is a term for when companies misuse/abuse UX principles to trick people into acting against their own best interests. In this case, the bold “click me” looking button in the screenshots means “yes daddy, spank me and then sell my data to your friends”, which is the option that most people who see that box won’t want to click.

Unfortunately, a large swath of the general population are trained in their brains to “click ok to make it go away”. These UX decisions take advantage of those people.

Assumedly, the grayed out box will also not dismiss the banner, but instead lead to a more complicated experience where you then are forced to drill down into complicated options to decide which of the cookies to set, which will be confusing if you didn’t open the link at top in a new tab to cross reference which of the 27 ~~data brokers~~ “Technology Partners” to decide which.

It’s not UX, it’s abusive UI and the very definition of malicious compliance to EU regulations.