Looks to me like the regulations did exactly what they were designed to do, and Azure implemented support for the EU market. The goal of these regulations is not to make things harder for companies trying to publish products in different regions, the goal is to get the big platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) to implement systems that are in line with EU privacy requirements.

I'm sorry your business was impacted during the period where the regulations came into effect and the big platforms did not have compliant services ready. It would have been better if the negative externalities of these regulations would be entirely carried by the big platforms who are responsible for consumer privacy in the first place.

However all the GDPR requirements entered into force just in may 2018?

But in any case, the point is that the issue is solved without changing the laws or people having to switch cloud providers, as simply the global cloud providers have started offering compliant services.