> Real examples of organisations I have come across who have to comply with GDPR include a local community theatre, a parish church etc. They are keep fairly simple information, and not exchanging it with anyone, but they still have to put effort into ensuring compliance.

Yeah, and that is precisely where you want something like the GDPR to be as well!

Large corporations are one thing, they have compliance departments, but so, so many local organizations have gotten hacked or data exfiltrated because "why do software and hardware updates when everything is working" or due to incompetence ("cc all"). GDPR finally gave the younger crowd some leverage to get the old guard to do things at least somewhat decently.

Well, wait until you are at the receiving end. It can get nasty pretty quickly.

What does each one of your systems store exactly? Do they allow configuration of reasonable data retention policies for PII? What do your systems log? How do you make sure that only the minimum amount of PII (including user IP addresses) is logged and that the covered logs are destroyed at the end of a reasonable retention period?

How do you handle Data Subject Access Requests? Can you compile all the data related to that person in a reasonable time to send it to them?

How do you handle deletion requests? Can you name all the data storage that is affected if a deletion request comes in? Are your systems technically capable of deleting the data? What data is exempt (e.g. billing addresses can't just be deleted before the mandated archival period is over)? Do you maintain backups? Then how do you make sure that data covered by a deletion request is destroyed and stays gone even in the event of a backup recovery?

Nobody who wants to bootstrap a business wants to deal with any of this. It's an enormous time sink.