Cookies are not always bad. Sometimes they are bad, sometimes they are useful. On this website, I use these.
Consent: I record your preferences regarding cookies in a cookie. You can change your preferences at any time using the cookie dialog box that you can open clicking on the cookie icon in a corner at the bottom of the screen. There are other mechanisms for storing pieces of information such as this, but a cookie is the most flexible and allows for finer control in a website's rendering process.
Analytics: these are the cookies that allow me to keep track of your steps through this website. Analytics give me information like where you are coming from, what you searched to get here, or what links you followed to get here, what pages you visit on the website, and how you leave the website. Think about this as kind of a visitor counter that knows if you are new or you've been here before, and a little survey at the end of what you liked and didn't like during your visit.
Because I care a lot about privacy, I use Matomo for analytics, and I host it myself. Matomo is a privacy-conscious analytics platform that doesn't just hoover your data up and sells it to the highest bidder. What is even more interesting is that you can host Matomo yourself on your own server so that you know exactly where the visitors' data is stored.
Ads: at the moment, I am not showing any ads. Jury's still out on what the best ads platform is, but I may end up going back to Google in the future.