Sole proprietorship doesn't have liability protection. That's not a small thing.

>You shouldn't (and cannot) go all the way to the complexities of a GmbH (LLC) if your company is that tiny.

"[Thing] is too complex, don't bother with it" is not an argument against making [thing] less complex. It's actually just a restatement of the problem!

Other countries make it easy to set up a limited company. UK, US, Singapore, they're all just a token fee and a handful of forms. I see no reason for Germany to make it so difficult as described in the article.

A lot of successful companies were started by broke college grads out of their dorms; they would never have gotten off the ground if they had to scrounge together the equivalent 25k euros before even getting started. Hell, I don't have a spare 25k lying around and I've been working full time for 4 years.