Sounds like Germany’s company register[1].

You can search for companies, select the documents you’d like to see (like shareholder lists), then you go through a checkout process and pay 0 EUR (used to be like a few euros years ago), and then you can finally download your file. Still a super tedious process, but at least for free nowadays.

[1] https://www.unternehmensregister.de/ureg/

Quite literally yes. There are often multiple click throughs. Every Department, agency, sub-agency, all the way down to federal dog catcher has decided the most important thing is to invent a new way of getting data from them.

Pretty much. USGS’s EarthExplorer requires a login just to download free files https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/

There are other ways to access the data on here, but they’re fragmented. It’s nicely organized here so it’s a bummer they make it hard to programmatically retrieve files once you find what you’re looking for.