Is this really a thing? I had a .eu
domain for years. I only let it go this year(it was on annual renewal) . My registered address was and is still in UK and I never had any trouble from my registrar(eurodns) about the EU domain. Or do they do it based on the payment method? (I might have used an EU cc to renew)?
It seems .eu domains are more or less only available to people who live in the EU/EEA, hold EU/EEA citizenship or businesses that conduct business in the region.
And that was always so; it's not "more-or-less", you've never been able to have a .eu domain unless you "belong to" the EU, for various values of "belong to". Always read the T&C.
You're being downvoted but this is actually good advice.
As someone who worked in domain names for 5 years, I often suggest to either use one of the historical gTLDs (com, net, info, org) or the ccTLD of your country if it's popular enough (.fr for France, .uk/.co.uk for United Kingdom, etc.)
Never use the ccTLD of a different country than yours, eligibility rules can change with very short notice. For .eu the notice was long enough but nothing guarantees it to be the case. Some trendy ccTLDs also have crappy infrastructure (.so of Somalia for example has provoked at least one outage for Notion.so).
Be very careful with newGTLDs, some of these are outright scam. There are some reliable newGTLDS (.app/.dev from Google for example, yeah, even though it's Google they have to play by ICANN's rules) but if you don't know how to determine the reliability of a newGTLD, just stick with .com/.net.
As I said before, it does not matter. Before someone had an email address and now they don't, and it could happen to anyone with an .eu domain. This is what matters. It is an unreliable TLD for email addresses that you want to last.