> That's the intention?

The intention, I believe, is that it discourages from collecting superfluous data. The easiest way to address the GDPR is to not collect any data at all. If you do, then it becomes harder.

> as they barely know they have it, and they will use minimal efforts to fiddle with this stuff.

Big companies have a real incentive to act. I believe the GDPR has forced BigTech to make at least some changes, because it was better to make those changes than to pay the fine.

In my experience, smaller companies don't really care and don't really want to know, and tend to collect as muich data as they can just because they can and "it may be useful later". Many times they never use the collected data.