What I find really fascinating is that the route of administration can affect your tolerance even if the potency theoretically should be the same. If you consume edibles often (eg for health reasons) you'll find you increasingly need larger and larger doses until it plateaus somewhere. If you "switch it up" and consume the same quantity via, say, a concentrate you vaporize, it'll hit you a lot harder. Even if you don't change the route of administration but the circumstances (like a new location) there's a similar effect.
So it was 40mg. I was super high on the bus on my way home, I cannot deny. Thankfully I could still handle and enjoy it. I think if it was 50mg, it would have been a whole different experience.
In my comment above, I meant to say 2 10mg doses, since we were talking about adding up to 20mg. It's the kind of mistake that's fine as a typo, but quite a different thing irl.
Of course, the problem with a pot brownie is that I may start intending to only eat a quarter of it but then somehow it all ends up getting eaten pretty quickly...
Having said that eating 2 20mg gummies to get high, or a handful of weaker ones that still add up to 20mg to get high, results in the same thing (as you've mentioned). Most people can easily, and happily, eat a handful of gummies.
I guess that law is why our packaging also includes the concentrations for the whole package as well as the per-unit concentrations - to make some of it saleable in the parts of the US with the type of laws your describing.
Federally legal weed is a cash cow for the government and provinces here alike. Sadly it's hard to profit for the producers, so the stock market value is terrible.
Imagine a government that can make it hard to profit off of weed! Pretty shocking on its own. So full legalization is a "damned if you do; damned if you don't" situation for producers.