Turning off a site for EU is pretty easy: setup a geo IP lookup and return a sad page; minimal testing and you're unlikely to break it.

Turning off trackers is harder, you do the same geo IP, but then you have to find all the places you put trackers, and disable them, and test the site without them, and somehow make sure when the next tracker is inserted, it doesn't go to EU. If your code is well managed, it might be easy, but if you're a newspaper, who knows. They may have several different generations of template systems, with older articles staying on what they were published with, or older articles may be static html with embedded trackers.

They have no obligation to bend over backwards for a market they’re not interested in.

Obviously, because then US users would be treated 'unfairly' and could end up using the EU as a way to get around that tracking, too ..