Though, that's an exceedingly narrow perspective, judging things exclusively on the effect on startup costs and ignoring everything else. An increase in startup costs often is an acceptable price to pay in order to achieve other goals. For instance, environmental regulations definitely make it more expensive and difficult to spin up many kinds of industrial plants (e.g. plant builders need to buy pollution control equipment and use more expensive processes that create less pollution), but it means less unhealthy air and rivers that can support life and don't catch on fire [1]. All the competition in the world won't achieve that.
I think it's pretty useless to talk about "regulations" generically. It's really only helpful to talk about the costs and benefits of particular regulations, since that's the only context where you can figure out if the regulation is a net good or not.
[1] https://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Cuyahoga_River_Fire
> Case in point, I've run a forum for coders for 15 years with thousand of users. When the GDPR came out, I did not have time to make sure I follow it, the cost was too high, I shut it down. And of course the law was to protect users privacy from big evil companies. Guess who had money and resources to make sure they follow it.
While that may have been a negative to you personally, the alternative is to allow those big companies to violate users' privacy in ways the law forbids, which is worse. Also, I'm a little skeptical that the GDPR would actually placed much if any burden on site such as yours.