Not serving EU customers for better sleep?

You would have to not serve most of the world, GDPR-like laws are being adopted everywhere to facilitate data transfer with the EU. Japan, South Korea, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, China, India, Brazil and many other countries, and New York and California in the United States all have comparable laws now. It's only a matter of time before everyone will, that's how important the European market is.

What risks do you expect to be imposed on your business?

GDPR is common sense that you should be doing anyway if you respect your customers.

It is like saying, we don't sell our soda in the EU because their health requirements are too strict.

It doesn't inspire trust in the way you make your soda now does it?

There are only so many things a single person can focus on (hint: this is why companies get big). A solo entrepreneur or a small company needs to focus on a small set of things. That may involve only releasing your product in English or only worrying about US regulations by not launching outside the US. It depends on what you're doing.

If you are not in Europe, don't specifically target EU customers, and are small, I would simply ignore the GDPR.

How about CA, USA with similar legislation?

Go once through the whole process and put everything on right and then serve EU customers as well.

You can use Paddle as your payment provider and it will handle VAT for you.

For a small business I would imagine GDPR is pretty much just have a straight forward privacy policy that states your intentions with someone's data. If someone requests their data then send it to them, if they want it deleted then do. I think that GDPR likely doesn't come up for the majority of small business besides a data consent pop up on a homepage.

You know the expression to re-arrange deck chairs on the Titanic?

GDPR is common sense "don't screw your customers", so you should probably follow it anyway.

VAT collection is more complicated. Every significant platform should contain support for doing this, though. Are you coding your shop yourself from scratch?

Makes sense to me.

It's no different than not distributing a physical product to Europe.

Or having a website entirely in Japanese.

Or a storefront only business.

And people who want what you are selling have the similar option taking on the risks of acting through an intermediary and accepting responsibility for VAT and GDPR.

If you're lucky enough to survive and even luckier to thrive, you can always expand to serve that market later.

Good luck.

Go all in on GDPR, handling data sovereignty, etc.

Can't worry about it if it's the table stakes of doing business.