It probably wasn't worth the effort to block foreign countries just from random unnecessary compute cost to serve a site to them, but when those countries start being serious about penalties you could face for serving their residents? Now it's justifiable to block non-US countries.
After all, using a VPN doesn't absolve companies of the GDPR.
Every site that gdpr-blocks itself is saying that they intend to extract value from your data and they don't want to tell you how.
Sometimes if you're just one person and the EU isn't a core market and you are a small business or non-profit, it's easier to just say, ok you know what, no thanks to all this for now.
"Will you sell my data?"
"This interview is over. (I'm very busy.)"
No! Of course not! It's because you don't care about Turkmenistan, to the extent you've never even bothered to look up what is and is not legal there, let alone get legal advice about it. That's a perfectly fine answer. This random Michigan newspaper doesn't care about the EU. That's a perfectly fine answer too.
Me: "No."
Use of AWS availability zones as it applies to Article 5?
Equally surprised would be the authors of very many legal books and journals, e.g. https://www.cambridge.org/core/browse-subjects/law/european-...
Also not a "European law" by any measure or understanding, that's a international organization that does police cooperation across the continent (and further), it isn't even a law enforcement agency... Not exactly sure how you could confuse that with laws, but here we are.
There are services that will do this for you. Last I checked they were typically in the neighborhood of a couple hundred Euros a year.
Whether or not GDPR applies to a site not in the EU is somewhat subjective. It comes down to whether you envisaged serving people in the EU.
If your site does not need EU visitors it can make some sense to block them. That provides evidence that you did not envisage serving people in the EU, and then you don't have to figure out if you need to be hiring a service in the EU to receive GDPR mail.
This may be true for in house ads, but there are ad networks that already are able to personalize ads and have ad inventory for such foreign countries.