The EU's plan from the start has been to make the process so painful as to dissuade anyone else from trying. Martin Selmayr was boasting that he has managed to trap the UK.
Brexit wasn’t ever any good for Europe. It was always only about the British.
How?
Why?
They made it so difficult and so scary to warn the other states to not even try to think about an exit.
How is that democratic?
If the EU is so convinced that the only way is the EU way they should have made it easy for the UK to leave, then watch it as it burned to the ground and groveled to try to buy its way back into the EU then maybe the other states would have thought: Gee, it did not work for the EU but at least now we know and we won't try!
Instead, the EU is trying to make an example of the Uk as a show of force to the other states. The EU is ruling with fear and acting like a bully!
And that's forgetting the fact the EU leaders could have seen Brexit as a wake-up call and maybe changed the course of action and reform the EU from within to give people what they fucking promised when this thing was made in the first place: prosperity, safety, so on and so forth.
Instead, they march forward with more integration, more federalism, more Europe, as if the nations don't count anymore. Free trade is the new God in town and it doesn't take prisoners.
Lets forget the fact the economic growth for the EU is one of the weakest in the world for the last 15 years, that the youth unemployment rate is roughly 25% and that because the wages are so low due to the enormous amount of tax being paid by the companies and citizens, they have resorted to importing people from 3rd world countries in order to fill job vacancies that only exists because nobody can actually afford to work for such a low wage.
A new age of slavery built on top of migrant workers.
Ain't the EU pretty?
God forbid you are against them! 30 years ago if you showed any sign of reservation towards unregulated capitalism you were labeled a communist and shamed by the major political parties, nowadays if you are against the EU, you are labeled as backward, illiterate and racist/fascist/populist.
The words have changed, the technics are the same.
How is it difficult? You trigger article 50 and in two years time you're out, no questions asked.
Whether it's scary depends only on whether you're scared by the prospect of not having the advantages of membership anymore. If all the things you're saying about the EU are true, then leaving the EU should not be scary at all.
Let's try this with a simpler example. Let's assume that the UK and the EU are two people in a monogamous marriage and the UK wants to divorce the EU.
EU: "Sure, we can divorce, but we can still be friends."
UK: "No, I want to break up and still have sex with you, but also with others and I want you to cuddle me at night when I want to, but with no commitments from me."
EU: "No. We can either be friends or we can be married, but you can't have all the benefits with no drawbacks."
How exactly is the EU a gangster for this? It's basically like any other relationship in the world, be it economic, political, emotional. The two sides have to agree. The UK is free to go out without a deal at any time.
The EU will carry on with a melancholic resignation if the UK does a no deal exit. It'll be just as painful for the EU to do all those border checks, Belfast will tense up again, the queue at Gibraltar will get longer, crossing at Dover and Calais will be simply silly long and all the unmentioned things are even more complicated by default. The EU has rules how to handle them and does it rutinely, the UK can probably dig up a few old rulebooks and then they'll throw them away and will probably start with the EU rules anyway, as those are relevant, contemporary, up to date, known, tested, tried and used already.
And the problem with slowly drifting away from the EU is that the EU ingress points won't know which rules the UK changed, or which new rules the UK forgot to adopt, so checks will have to be performed. Every port, airport, other ingress point will have to treat anybody and anything from the UK as outside EU. Full stop.
If the UK wants to avoid that it has to offer something to the EU to get that special treatment. (It always had special treatment, it had right to selectively implement directives and regulations, but it hadn't utilized that right except in a few important cases, like they opted out of the Eurozone, Schengen area, etc.)
So, all in all, the burden of treating the UK as an important close-to-EU-but-not-EU entity has to worth something to the UK, right? May and co. basically offered nothing except that we'll figure it out later.
All of the problems that the last 2 years of brexit negotiations wanted to "solve" are solved by an 'even closer cooperation'.