That's why we need to realize, that decisions in the small constitute what happens in the large. If some person comes and tells me to implement dark patterns into the consent popup, I'll tell them that this is illegal. I'll also tell people, when their current consent is manufactured or when their cookie/consent popup does not conform with GDPR. Been there, done that. Only unfortunate, that it was not my role to deal with that. It was simply that most people didn't care (I must assume frontend developer knew better, otherwise they were utterly uninformed about their job), some people who should have known better didn't (everyone else in the engineering team), some people wanted dark patterns to be in there (project management and marketing/sales, as usual), and I was the only one pointing out the tiny problem with the law. Of course no one ever thanked me for that.
It's not that people who implement those things don't care, per se. It's that they care about getting their paycheck more (or, in the current climate, retaining their job). And they are also acutely aware that if they refuse to do it, a replacement that won't is easy to find.
I have been in that situation in a startup. The boss would come to me and ask for some dark pattern (not cookies, I don't remember exactly what it was). I said I wouldn't do it. They literally asked a guy in the adjacent room, and he took it as a new task and did it.
He was not a bad guy: I did not care about getting fired (I was young and single), he did (he had a family). And in his opinion, if the boss wanted it, anyway it would end up being done. His job was to implement what the boss wanted, not to contradict the boss.
