I'm sure a lot of countries in EU did this. First hand I know, they did this in Croatia as I was one of the developer who had to use it to deploy on it.
The worst thing I have ever seen in my life. And I worked on a lot legacy apps written in VB.NET, Web forms, old Sharepoint, Basic and even when the whole app was one big mess of store procedures.
AWS, Azure, GC are at least written with thought about end users (us, developers) while government cloud was architectured, designed and built by the lowest bidder whose first goal was to cut and cut and cut his costs whenever possible.
In my country (Croatia), post WW2 schools in rural areas were one man band. You had professor / teacher and he was in charge about anything and everything in the school.
Also, note that some (if not majority) of kids were malnourished, so an older child could look like "properly developed" much younger kid.
Those schools existed for two reasons:
a) to teach kids how to read and write and some very basic math
b) find ones with potential and connect them with benefactor to sponsor theirs more advanced education
Just to add to this - I'm from Zagreb (Capital of Croatia, former Yugoslavia republic) - we literally have nudist beach a mile or two from strict center of the city (https://tourist.hr/place/nudist-beach-jarun).
When you are working as backend developer and your clients are mobile devices, is your message 8 times smaller or bigger is difference between up-and-running and outage.
I think we should separate telemetry from spyware. It is not close the same. We all have telemetry is our cars, yet nobody is making any fuss about it. Even in software engineering profiling database queries or active memory is not something anew and I don't recall we had any problems with that.
Neither is Croatia.
However, it is usually much easier / faster to enter Schengen from Croatia (which is part of European Union) or Ireland or UK then from, e.g., Ukraine.
Also, in airports there is usually "more-relaxed" EEU line to get into any European union country (+ some other like UK and Switzerland), no matter is it in Schengen or not.
Disclaimer: I'm living in Croatia.
You still need time based planning. You can't go to client and say it will take 500 points to finish the project. You also can't bill story points.
Yes, after some time velocity will enable you to easily convert points to time, but in real world when customer is de facto product owner and team size is in constant flux depending on each customer wishes, you need experience engineer to give you ballpark value how long something will take long before the coding even starts.
Problem is, if we take it to extreme, we are basically playing Cluedo game.
Is "18 year old" PII? - no
Is "orders pizza every Friday" PII? - no
Is "always misspells word cheese" PII? - no
Is "leaves 10% tip" PII? - no
Combine it and you have PII.
Firstly - I yet have to get solid definition of "personal data". Is it my name or is it "1.8m tall guy in green T-shirt who is head of team X"?
Definition is so blurred (or so board) you can virtually classify any data as personal.
AWS, Azure, GC are at least written with thought about end users (us, developers) while government cloud was architectured, designed and built by the lowest bidder whose first goal was to cut and cut and cut his costs whenever possible.