If by “effectively outlawed” you mean “not effectively outlawed at all”, then yes, sure.

How many people can survive for 2 years on 50% lower salary? In addition, the biggest impediment of non-competes is actually the inflexibility (“your job offer sounds amazing, I’ll start working in 18-24 months!”).

The point is that will very very rarely happen because how many companies are actually going to pay that much to stop you working at a competitor?

And if they ARE willing to do it, then you probably held a very high status job there and so 50% will still be a lot.

Alternatively put: how many people would be willing to take a 2-year paid holiday on 50% of their current salary, with the option to work as many hours as they like in any non-competing industry in the interim? Sounds like it could be a pretty sweet deal if you found a good job for those two years.

In practice these restrictions are big enough that non-competes are pretty rare except for key personnel with trade secrets and that the restrictions are reasonably narrow. I don't think I know anyone who has signed one. Of course it's still not great for those few people, but they're usually doing well enough as is.

EDIT: I did some googling around and almost every resource referencing them talks about C-level executives and senior managers. So that should give you a rough idea of their prevalence.

The assumption is that a job that would incentivize non-competes would be so well paid that 50% would still be comfortable, isn't it ?

From my experience working in finance in London, no.

Good salary? Sure! Able to live comfortably with 50% salary (when rent is 30-50% of take-home pay)? Zero chance.

In practice the biggest impediment to even longer non-competes is legal risk; the tiny chance of an employee challenging the non-compete in court and the court ruling unreasonable or overly broad, would result in all other employees knowing their non-competes are effectively void.

Did you have to sign a non-compete for that job? Regardless of the exact reason for the impediment, it still remains that due to the restrictions, non-competes are not common enough in the EU to even be in the vocabulary of regular working people. I can't find any concrete numbers but it's definitely nowhere near the ridiculous 18% jobs that have them in the US. So it's pretty hard to argue the restrictions aren't effective.

Isn't it the case that you can still work elsewhere in the meantime, just not for direct competitors? So you may get 70-80% of your previous salary working outside your more lucrative niche, but your previous employer still pays you 50% of your old salary to make up for it? Surely a non-compete can't be so broad that it forces you into unemployment.

> How many people can survive for 2 years on 50% lower salary?

You mean 50% of their previous salary plus a full salary working in a related field?