I don't know who you are or what your qualifications are, but at least some of what you've said is in conflict with guidance I have seen from qualified professionals (some of which were in mutual disagreement).

I'll note that two paragraphs above the point you quote from, under 65, the description of the right to be forgotten includes that "a data subject should have the right to have his or her personal data erased and no longer processed". I.e. erasure and cessation of processing are not the same but are both required. Your point about 67 only clarifies the second of those requirements. 66 describes something of the extent of erasure, but doesn't define it erasure -- one controller should inform other controllers who are processing data "to erase any links to, or copies or replications of those personal data", which doesn't seem to clearly support your interpretation.

> "The 'no beatings' law just makes we want to beat people even harder". You sound petty.

No, the point is if you have just a pile of event spew, it's legitimately more work to first e.g. group by user. If you have a user-indexed pile of events, without any particular hostile animus, still your data team has a warm start on user-centric analyses. But you sound snide.

> Treat PII as if it were hazardous waste; minimise your collection of it and processing of it, dispose of it as soon as you can.

In the ML/AI era, it quickly becomes very hard to justify ignoring your data that happens to have user-linked data in it. Users want and use recommendations and experiences that are informed by their personal data. Even if their data doesn't include PII fields like names, addresses or phone numbers etc, their right to object to processing, or ask for all their data to be disclosed to them, or to ask that it be deleted extends to all the usage and behavioral data that products are built on.

> You just don't like having to do it, and would prefer if once a user gives consent (or even if they don't), you can keep that data and do anything you like with it for all time and there's nothing the user can do about it.

Maybe don't try to tell other people what they like? I'm actually in favor of strong data protection laws, and I wish my own country would adopt some. I think the broad provisions of the GDPR are generally positive. However, I do think very little clear material was available for companies who were trying to come into compliance by the time it went into effect. In particular, there was no certification system, no official or regulator who you could get a live response from, no qualified inspector you could hire who could confidently evaluate whether a system did or did not meet the requirements of the new law. GDPR went into effect in 2018 and only this year was the Europrivacy certification fully approved under article 43. In the period from 2016 to 2018 many companies, including those not in the EU, were in the bad position of needing to draw up plans for large projects to make our data architecture meet the requirements as interpreted by our counsel, and in some cases evaluating whether it even made sense to do business in the EU (if you happened to only have a small amount of business there).