The thing is, if you're visiting some business's site often enough that this kind of repetition is going to bug you but you're not actually engaging in a way that is beneficial for them, you are exactly the kind of dead weight that they are probably better off without from a commercial point of view. Irritating you enough that you go away and stop wasting their bandwidth is likely to be a (very small) win for them.
Of course, if you're visiting a site for a person or organisation that you are actually engaging with and they still do this, you are entitled to feel karmic smugness the next time they forget their umbrella and it rains. :-)
That was what I tried to indicate with the "intimate viewer". If you've shown enough value to me that I register an account with you, cookies are on.
But if you're some site I'm just visiting for the first time, then no, you don't get free use of my disk and machine to track me. When I mentioned "every time", for some sites, this is often "every page load" — so I'm not a repeat visitor.
Which, if I'm not an intimate viewer of your site, means every time.