EU privacy law is so vague that people routinely 'discover' new impacts of the rules only when some judge pulls them out of thin air. The fate of EU tech firms is pretty much well described above: endless agonizing over how these rules might be interpreted, followed by maximally damaging interpretations, because the nature of such law making is that enforcement is arbitrary.
> Your wild edge case is someone else's life and living.
Yes, the person whose name is mangled by a shitty bank's IT systems. Or the people who can see what a shitty data vacuuming company has on them( that now has to ask for consent beforehand).
Regulations are there to protect people like that, not just for fun.
The article you've linked is obviously biased ( why does it make a point of talking about totalitarian communist regimes and their death toll and not any other totalitarian regimes'? Some of the most infamous and deadly totalitarian regimes aren't communist - Iran's Islamic one, Saddam in Iraq, Hitler, Mussolini). And the argument that totalitarian regimes are bad because they wage war and that democracies can't even execute serial killers falls apart when the US is brought in. I won't even bother with the rest.