On one hand EU does things like this^ to protect their people (like right-to-repair stuff, also made apple use USB-C instead of lightning and whatnot)

but then they try to implement severe privacy-invading shit like chat-control, what's happening?

The EU is not one voice. It's comprised of multiple member states, each one with their own views and opinions. One member state proposed privacy friendly laws and it passes, another proposed privacy invasive laws and it doesn't pass.

It's a distributed democracy.

Like all bureaucracies .. the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

Also our government (I'm a citizen in the kingdom of Denmark) doesn't listen to experts when it comes to IT/security/encryption and is making a fool of itself..

It will pass.

Because the world view of people leading EU isn't the same as American "corporations and the state are the same thing'.

Once you get that, a lot of thing start to make sense.

Chat Control isn't really "the EU". It's the national governments. USB-C was the bureaucrats/technocrats ("the EU"), Chat Control is government ministers from each country (the "Council")

The official name is not "Chat Control" but rather "The Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse".

Of course, people are free to claim that it won't work, or that it's heavy handed, or that it's secretly nefarious, but there is a plausible answer to "why?" in the title itself.

The EU isn't one single decision-maker. There was a brief period where the EU had both the GDPR and the Data Retention Directive, which were practically contradictory (the courts nuked the Data Retention Directive).

First paragraph is about regulating US companies. It doesn’t affect the interests of the EU oligarchs.