0756 — Accept all wears the dark pattern

Context

[0599] gave the consent bar three equally prominent buttons, on the reasoning that equal prominence is the compliance-vendor convention. It is not. The banner a reader has dismissed a thousand times sells one button and buries the other two: Accept all is large and lit, Reject is a footnote, Manage preferences is a link. Equal prominence made the bar politer than the thing it imitates, which blunted both the disguise and the punchline — Accept all is the answer that hacks the reader, so the bar should be seen pushing it.

Decision

Act one’s buttons take the dark pattern the real banners use, and lean past it.

• Accept all keeps the era face, a step larger than its neighbour, and gains what the other buttons lack: a gold rim that never stops turning, with a pulsing amber glow. The rim is the button’s own border-box paint layer — a conic gradient whose angle is a registered custom property — so it animates in place with no wrapper and no z-index step.
• Reject non-essential stays the plain era button beside it, and Manage preferences stays the buried link: the rim alone carries the hierarchy.
• The hacked modal plays the same pattern: “please no, I’ll do anything” — the link that stars the repo — is the larger button with the rim, and “accept fate” is the plain one beside it.
• The rim is the era button’s data-bait state in the utilities layer, its keyframes beside it, and the tokens layer owns the rim and the two glow shadows (--era-bait-rim, --shadow-era-bait, -peak); amber is stated once and the night board inherits it, as the hacked veil does. Each surface sizes its own bait button, as it already sizes its buttons.
• All motion sits behind prefers-reduced-motion: a reader who opts out gets the same gold rim, still.

Rejected: an oversized Accept all with Reject shrunk to a footnote (tried, and it read as a parody of a banner instead of a banner — the disguise has to hold until the press); a hover-only rim (the point is that it draws the eye before the pointer arrives).

Consequences

• [0599]‘s equal-prominence bullet is superseded; the rest of that record — the two acts, the privacy statement, the storage key — is unchanged.
• The labels, the accessible names, and which act two each button reaches are untouched: the pattern is visual only, and every answer still tells the reader the truth.