Brexit didn’t really help in terms of privacy though, the UK being one of the leading western anti-encryption countries politically.

At least within the EU you have the chance of having at least one member state be an adult about it and realise that mass surveillance won’t work out the way they hope.

Well, the UK government could still introduce a law of their own anyway. Unless you're saying the EU would've created an EU-wide law that mandated that member states couldn't do it, but that seems very unlikely based on what we know of the EU.

They kind of have one. The charter of fundamental rights of the EU contains privacy protections that has been used to shoot down at least the data retention directive and IIRC the EU-US data transfer frameworks.

It’s possible that the CJEU strikes down a chat control-style law based on that charter, but preferably we don’t have to test that.

It's probably made the nation more fragile / less resilient to externals shocks though, such as Covid and the Ukraine invasion.