I've met a few Americans living like that in Portugal, there are communities that formed in some villages away from the main cities where real estate is very cheap since most villagers had died or moved out. They were proud of not paying Portuguese taxes, I couldn't understand how you can be proud of taking advantage of a society while not contributing financially to it to support the services you enjoy.

It's hard for me to understand this mentality...

The real question is why the Portuguese government is allowing this to happen?

NHR (the tax scheme that the parent is discussing) ended. If you didn't already move to Portugal under it, it's no longer available to you, so your question should really be in the past tense.

NHR 2.0 offers much reduced benefits and in a much narrower scope.

Once you get used to paying less taxes you don't want to go to paying more and getting the mostly the same. Healthcare costs is different. Also there's the high EU VAT taxes which are taxes already.

Sure, just don't live at a place where you are defrauding the tax system while extracting the most expensive benefits from it: education and healthcare.

Sounds smarmy as hell.