> I do appreciate the fact that it's a nuisance at best and significant costs at worst to be compliant to GDPR.

I don't know that it's that simple. What happens when you have conflicting requirements, for example (I'm making them up) EU requiring you to delete PII within a period of time and US/Homeland Security/IRS requiring you to keep the (meta)data for some period of time?

There may be conflicting requirements that have nothing to do with technology & costs.