It had been in the works for a while, but now it has formally been adopted. From the article:
The regulation provides that by 2027 portable batteries incorporated into appliances should be removable and replaceable by the end-user, leaving sufficient time for operators to adapt the design of their products to this requirement.
There’s not that much choice there, it genuinely takes 2-3 years to implement hardware that is radically different from what you’re currently doing.
Because they’re making millions upon millions of phones, they need to really nail the design before they start mass production. And that’s neither cheap nor fast.
The big manufacturers can probably afford to do this faster, but the smaller ones might struggle so you need to make it fair.
By ‘those privacy laws’ do you mean GDPR? Because that’s caused Threads not to be released in the EU, and you’ll notice that all your devices now have USB C. These regulations have had a pretty significant impact.