He probably means its just another factor in why there's very few startups/innovative companies in Europe.

I did consulting and for a fair amount of projects where we had to block all European traffic while GDPR compliance was sorted out. There was almost never anything we had to actually do/change but the threat was looming and it was easier to just not take the risk.

This, to me, sounds like personal opinion. Many developers in the EEA, while agreeing that it causes extra work, like the spirit of GDPR. The attitude (a generalisation) towards the American way of working with private data, is generally that it's unethical. It's not hard to find developers who are happy to, and want to, work within the framework.