Space DC make sense when local governments and communities don't want DC built on Earth. Space DC is an engineering and finance problem, not a problem in legal/permission, real estate, power generation, grid delivery, environmental, etc.
Wouldn't it be best if the data centers were just... good neighbors? Like everyone talking about illegal bribes and impossible moonshots when the answer is just don't suck?
Up till recently, they were a rare enough object that distressed communities still saw the glitz and glam that they are sold with as valuable. Now that brutalist assholes are trying to jam them in every nook and cranny of the earth, word is getting out and people aren't buying it anymore.
There have been some attempts to try floating or water immersed data centers that mitigate or at least hide some of their suckiness, but these were hard and costly, so the incentives weren't there to do them anyway. Maybe now those ideas will resurface and improve, but I expect "bribe, con or sue rural community to destroy their quality of life" is still cheaper and easier.
You don't get caught paying bribes if government officials aren't accepting bribes. The problem is the governments have been operating in a mode where blocking everything is the default and paying bribes is the expected way for things to get approved.