To me as an American, this is a very high-touch view of lawmaking that sounds like a big problem for companies trying to do new stuff or challenge incumbents. If the meaning of the law is adjusted to fit each individual business case, doesn't that mean the regulator might not let me have all the same adjustments my competitors got? I wouldn't call this a question of hostility as such; even a kind and friendly regulator might think that some of those adjustments depend on doing business as normal, and thus they don't apply to the new abnormal things I'm doing. (Of course, I'm making the stereotypically American assumption that running around disrupting normal business practices is a valuable thing to do.)
Ironically, I have the opposite read on the same situation: "Just do what the law wants from you" seems like a pretty straightforward thing that even the smallest startup can follow.
In the case of GDPR that would be roughly "don't store any personal data you don't strictly need for the feature, ask for consent, delete data when asked".
Checkbox-lawyering on the other hand requires just that, lawyers. Expensive ones. Ideally entire legal departments.
If you're a huge incumbent, you can afford that. Meta finds the neatest little ways to technically comply without actually doing what the lawmakers wanted. The little startup? No chance.
The other concern is addressed by the judicial system. If a competitor got some exception you didn't get, that's your correction mechanism. The CJEU exists precisely to ensure consistent application across member states and cases. The purpose is the same for everyone; the implementation differs based on context, but the purpose doesn't change.
How can you say that when Europe has completely failed at producing any big, successful tech companies in the past couple decades? China and even India have a lot more staetups-turned-bigtech companies.
With the exception of Tesla (23) and Meta (22), USA is not brimming with large new tech companies from the past decades either.
I mean King, Spotify, and Klarna are not trillion dollar companies. But at least they are younger than Google.