There's summary in the article: "For this initiative, the Commission builds on the existing cross-border legal framework for trusted digital identities, the European electronic identification and trust services initiative (eIDAS Regulation). Adopted in 2014, it provides the basis for cross-border electronic identification, authentication and website certification within the EU. Already about 60% of Europeans can benefit from the current system.

However, there is no requirement for Member States to develop a national digital ID and to make it interoperable with the ones of other Member States, which leads to high discrepancies between countries. The current proposal will address these shortcomings by improving the effectiveness of the framework and extending its benefits to the private sector and to mobile use."

Because they will probably use Verifiable Credentials. That could lead to a lot of new use cases by reducing the KYC costs. Also embracing that tech for identity will open the door to any sort of proofs (like diploma, …). And eventually will kill the passwords.