No, the user must be aware of it and decide.

The real alternative is to not track at all. It's compliant, easy to implement, performant (the topic of the post) and does the right thing

or use progressive escalation, like I.e. Apples AppStore guidelines. Get the consent banner when the user performs an action that requires storing the data (i.e in a cookie)

That is your opinion, I think until login you should avoid setting cookies anyway and ask as part of that journey.

Login cookies are not considerea tracking cookies, you don't need to ask for user consent for that

I believe the argument here by the GP is that tracking cookies shouldn't be used at all until the user logs in.

No idea what that would do to any business value Airbnb gets from tracking, but the idea is that the lost analytics data is outweighed by the benefit of removing new user friction.

It's probably only compliant if it's off by default, but I doubt anybody will ever toggle it on anyway.