GDPR was just incredibly necessary.
Apple has been storing metadata for everything email you've sent. This is not the first time Apple has collected a ton of personal data without tell you. GDPR has been a godsend. We wouldn't have found things out like this without it.
GDPR itself would not be possible without the cooperation of several countries. A
recent episode of Talking Politics (which starts as a good non-technical explanation of what machine learning is) mentioned how very few single countries are more powerful than corporations like Google, Apple, Amazon, or Facebook. A request from, say, France, to corporations to reveal what they collect from users and to allow them to delete them would be laughed off. France and a couple dozen other countries, however, results in compliance.
Well, for the most part. Last I heard, Google and Facebook were facing a billions-of-dollars lawsuit in Europe for coercing users to waive their GDPR rights instead of fully complying. They have resources to win the lawsuit, and billions of dollars is a fraction of their wealth. They may actually be more powerful, in some ways, than dozens of nations together.