I encounter something similar to this often.

There’s a lot of cookie banners where “Accept All Cookies” is a single button but in order to reject cookies you have to press a “Manage Cookies” link which will have something similar to a “Reject All Cookies” button in it.

It’s very annoying.

Yes this would make sense.

Quote from “What methods can we use to obtain consent?”:

If you are asking for consent electronically, consent must be “not unnecessarily disruptive to the use of the service for which it is provided”. You need to ensure you adopt the most user-friendly method you can.

For a website, hiding rejection behind a link should class as “unnecessarily disruptive”. If you can provide consent with the press of a single button then rejecting should also be the press of a single button.

I think you’re referring to healthline: https://anon.healthline.com/

Not allowing users to access a service at all unless they accept cookies is often against GDPR. See: Can we use ‘cookie walls’?.

To quote:

In some circumstances, this approach is inappropriate; for example, where the user or subscriber has no genuine choice but to sign up. This is because the UK GDPR says that consent must be freely given.

If your use of a cookie wall is intended to require, or influence, users to agree to their personal data being used by you or any third parties as a condition of accessing your service, then it is unlikely that user consent is considered valid.

The key is that individuals are provided with a genuine free choice; consent should not be bundled up as a condition of the service unless it is necessary for that service.

These cookie banners often violate all sorts of GDPR rules even more explicitly than this example. For example did you know it’s not allowed to have pre-ticked boxes on cookie popups for non-essential cookies?