It's going to be awesome, yeah sure....
When governments start regulating stuff they hardly understand you'll get regulations which the involved sector will hardly understand. And that often results in major annoyances (or worse) for the group which rights those regulations should protect in the first place.
Take a look at the "cookie law"; it's a perfect example. Basically the law states that websites need to warn visitors before they come into contact with tracking cookies ("trackers"). But this regulation does not include cookies which you might need to keep your website running as optimal as possible.
Despite of that most companies basically approached the whole thing with "better to be safe than sorry" and made it involve every cookie on their website. And can you blame them? Because one could argue that every cookie can be used to track people; at the very least you can pick up from which domain they originated (or said to originate).
And as a result we now get to click 'yes' on almost every website. And to make sure they don't track you it's often stored in a cookie with a short expiration date so you can keep clicking yes, which has quickly became user annoyance number 1.
So when that researcher says that: "end users were already preparing for the new rules of the incoming regulation" I think he drew the wrong conclusions. End users aren't getting ready to sue the heck out of the market, I think they're getting ready to browse the web without getting annoying "cookie banners" on every site they visit.