Please explain how making it difficult to start a business and hire employees protects people. I've never understood that logic but maybe I'm missing something.

The goal isn't "making it difficult to start a business", the goal is to protect people, meaning things affecting the public are more controlled, slower and more bureaucratic to initiate. The slowness is a feature and there really isn't any "difficulty" in starting a business, it just takes time to fill out papers and wait for approvals and what not.

It's very simple to start a business, and it's even simpler to hire people.

It is hard to fire employee, especially when the company is doing good, yes.

It is a bit slow and administratively annoying to start a business in some countries, yes, though in those you can usually start operating while starting AND there are workarounds which is why there isn't enough pressure to stop it (eg, the german "pre made company shell" market is how you actually do it instead of making your own).

What regulations specifically do you find make it hard for you to start a business or hire people?

Go live a few months as an average middle class person in Western Europe and then do the same in the US. You can argue in favor of US superiority based on GDP and stock market and number of billionaires a hundred other similar metrics, but looking at basic happiness and quality of life there’s really no comparison. Europeans value maximizing family, community, physical and mental health, leisure time, hobbies, culture, and so their laws and policies are written in that way.

Yeh all I wanna do I hire a few employees, raise some capital and put my AI nudifier out into the hands of German schoolkids, but damn EU regulators just wants to keep the little guy down I guess