They totally can. They just don't really care, because they are mostly funded by advertisers.

More accurately, there has never been a EU law that forced people to create cookie banners.

The EU law required websites to have the users' consent to use personal data and tracking. The law never even mentioned the word "banner" but this is what the industry chose as a solution.

Furthermore consent is not needed for functional cookies. So all websites that enforce cookie banners upon users do really use tracking/data sharing or their partners (such as Google Analytics) do.

I am not against cookie banners, I own a few web apps and each of them have proper configurable cookie settings (including the banner).

All I am saying is that most companies (especially one's that do not reside in EU) do not care and will track you across websites by fingerprinting your hardware when visiting their website. Some do not even use cookies at all.

That's not how the industry works.

Also, here, fixed your statement for you: Privacy laws generally don't let you evade a restriction simply by changing the technical mechanism used to achieve the same tracking or identification. Whether something is a cookie, fingerprint, local-storage identifier, or another technique is often less important than what the technique does and what legal rule applies to that activity. However, the mechanism can still matter because different laws and provisions regulate different technical activities, and lawful tracking is not necessarily prohibited merely because its purpose is to track.

First of all, you're the one to choose what you're fingerprinting for, and if you include the battery or such changing factors maybe you should rethink your career as an engineer.

Which hash exactly? They don't have to include your battery percentage if they don't want it.