The whole thing also played like a game. 6 months ago the vote was signaled as pretty safely against chat control. You could watch how one by one the MEPs switched their positions. I assume they realized the vote wont hurt them because it's under the radar of general population. So it was safe to follow the lobby money.

I don't know about the other countries, but in Romania most politicians are aligned with our secret service (quite a few even in the upper echelons are literally undercover agents - which sounds like a conspiracy theory but is well documented in some cases), so they are quite naturally aligned with this initiative.

They have one job (with a high salary), a lot of personal assistants and technical support from specialist from their own party. They only have to remember if they have to press the red or the blue button.