Hey Graham,
Exactly, cookiebot prevents the _ga cookie to be set if consent is not given. The issue was that if I landed on the page and an experiment was running I was re-randomized as soon as I consented since the hasing we have is on the _ga cookie. What i've done now is that GrowthBook is not initialized at all until consent is given. I'm doing this by using an event listener from cookiebot.
There has always been an discussion regarding if you should still show the variation without consent, but just not track the user, but we have decided that the safest approach for us is to just not show anything at all related to growthbook until a user has given consent.
EDIT: I did notice now though that stopping the gbFeaturesCache also prevents features not part of an experiment to load, so will have to continue investigating regarding that.