Cookies can contain fingerprints, but they’re also used for a bunch of other things, like keeping you logged in, remembering your shopping cart rather than clearing it every page load, storing preferences, remembering if your device has a high DPI screen (so a fresh page load knows to serve higher quality images), etc. Anything where small amounts of data have to be persisted and shared across both the client-side and server-side. They’re not always evil.
Those two links are talking about fingerprinting.
Cookies can contain fingerprints, but they’re also used for a bunch of other things, like keeping you logged in, remembering your shopping cart rather than clearing it every page load, storing preferences, remembering if your device has a high DPI screen (so a fresh page load knows to serve higher quality images), etc. Anything where small amounts of data have to be persisted and shared across both the client-side and server-side. They’re not always evil.