This is not at all true in the US: it is not "technically illegal" to own transmit-capable equipment without a license.

It is true that transmissions are regulated by law in every country, and the particular license you need will be determined by frequency band and power. In the US, there are some cases ("Part 15") where no license is required.

Yeah, GMRS band is actually pretty permissive as long as you stay under the power limit(5W?).

as noted above "part 15" rules actually allow low-power transmission along a multitude of bands. In some bands you are restricted to only a few mw of power, others like the scientific bands allow more.

That cannot literally be true... your cellphones and wifi devices are radio transmitters and I'm assuming owning either is not specifically illegal. I assume you mean unlicensed equipment?

You are intentionally misinterpreting what I said, or maybe you do not know that some bands can be used by commercial devices. That doesn't mean you can do whatever you wish on any bandwidth you want.

But even in something as common as WiFi you still have regulations, like channel 14, which as far as I know only works in Japan by default. Other common restriction is transmitting power.

I’m not ”intentionally misrepresenting”, nor did I misunderstand — I was just being comically pedantic, because the absolute terms you couched your statement in are obviously not true, because a lot of personally-owned devices transmit radio and that doesn’t get you into any trouble whatsoever.