No. People didn't vote for that, because unfortunately the referendum was very non-specific "Do you want to leave the EU?" question with only a yes/no answer.

(Of course if there had been a "Yes, however you like", "Yes-gently", "yes-brutally", "no", kinda question the votes would have been split enough to make no consensus possible.)

Some people might have thought they were voting for a hard-exit, others a soft-one. But the actual specifics varied depending on who you spoke to.

It was Theresa May who drew a bunch of arbitrary lines in the sand, and essentially chose the kind of exit that would happen, but that was after a "Please Leave" result, not a vote on any specific form of exit.

After that things got vaguer.

But even if we pretend there was a specific kind of exit being voted for, the fact is things are still not "done" with the implementation. Checks on the UK-side are still absent, the whole Irish border situation is imprecise, and still not settled, and the mass-repealing of EU-related laws has been postponed.

All in all it's a mess, probably fair to say its a bigger mess if you voted remain, but still even if you voted leave I'd be surprised if you'd be happy with the current state of things.

I'm fairly sure that most brexit voters were expecting a soft brexit. There were plenty of politicians stating that it was absolutely not going to be a hard brexit, or at least that's what they said up until the vote.

Different politicians promised different things, with varying degrees of seriousness and commitment. (For example the Boris-Bus).

I realize I'm getting pedantic, but at the end of the day people just voted "Yes, leave" or "No, remain".

The actual specifics were wonderfully ambiguous.

(FWIW I'm a UK citizen, and I submitted a postal-vote for the referendum, having already left the country for unrelated reasons.)

UK Remoaner here.

I do remember brexit proponents going on TV and specifically stating that we would stay in the EU market and no way would it be a hard brexit.

But yes, the vote was flawed due to "brexit" not being defined at all.

If you are voting for vague promises and unrealistic, bonkers, literally impossible trade agreements, and end up with how brexit went, you have no one to blame but yourself. There was no "No longer be part of the EU" that would have resulted in a stronger Britain because the UK is not that important, so nobody would sacrifice themselves to make the lives of angry brits easier.

100% correct. Was not a negotiating failure, it was the desired outcome, though perhaps not the desired consequences of such an outcome

It's interesting to see interviews with people who voted for Brexit.

They understand that they have a worse life, but their emotions about the vote didn't change as significantly as their life circumstances because of their vote.

For many people it was a religious decision, a matter of faith. "You cannot reason people out of something they did not reason their way into"

It's because the reasons they have a worse life aren't caused by Brexit. The ruling party hasn't actually changed anything even though now they legally can.

It was essentially a 50/50 split. Why they decided before hand simple majority wins and not 66% or something is beyond me.

It is also told, that the EU has the toughest negotiators in the world. They got trained full-time on inner conflicts and just keep burying interlocutors, no matter the country.