I'm not sure what you're saying. Do you mean that each individual is supposed to know where every site is based instead of having country-wide/EU-wide protections in place?
Individuals are not perfectly capable of this decision, especially since they are multiple steps removed from said decision (e.g. saas I use is using another service hosted on amazon); and in a lot of the cases (e.g. using a software for their job) not even in a place where they can make the decision.
Government does not tell you where you should keep your data. They tell, where you can't.
This is because it is not a compliant place to store data at. Same reason we don't want you to store data in china, for example.