It was decided collectively(!) that a registration in the individual countries is the process to use. Against the original draft, in which the European Commission explicitly(!) proposed EU-wide packaging requirements due to concerns of fragmented processes.
The result is a nationalization of the packaging compliance for a producer, while the obligations for the product inside that packaging, the seller, the buyer, the payment transfer etc. are all already regulated on EU-level.
This should have been reviewed by the country members with local experts, in your case a duty of the German representatives in the EU, and ultimately opposed as bad solution for SMB (the very business that the government claims to support).
Now it is a enforced regulation. You can of course give feedback to the EU [0], but in my opinion the only meaningful (yet exhausting) move as a SMB is to put the pressure on your LOCAL government (directly and via the local chamber of commerce) that they frankly f#cked up in representing your interests, causing you a competitive disadvantage in the European single market.
We will need to extinguish every attempt to blame this on "the EU". Germany was THERE when this regulation was written, there were 14(!) sessions within the European Council and 5 sessions in the European Parliament on this topic throughout 2023 and 2024 [1]
The EU is very transparent on this process, e.g. in case of Germany you can look up that Delara Burkhardt of SPD was one of the rapporteurs of the process, but there is no noted contribution from German parliament to this regulation at all (but from Czech, Italy, Spain, Romania, Poland)
(Don't get me wrong, all the proposed steps above apply to me as well. We now need to create noise to rectify something that could have been easily avoided if elected representatives would also ... represent)
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/procedure/EN/2022_396#2023-07-19_O...