Calling them chronically underfunded is very charitable. Corrupt would be a more accurate term considering they’ve privately collaborated with Facebook on ways to effectively bypass the regulation they’re supposed to be enforcing, in disagreement with most other DPAs.

Sure but the claim was that TikTok is practically immune because they're a Chinese company and thus don't care what the EU thinks. My point was that they do business in the EU via their EU subsidiary in Ireland and that one is very much subject to EU laws.

Additionally the alternative to having a subsidiary in Ireland with a "special relationship" with the Irish DPA (look up "GDPR one-stop shop") they'd be subject to every single DPA in the EU at the same time, not just the Irish one, which would also mean every DPA could fine them independently. This is why people familiar with this arrangement paid particular attention to the restructuring at Twitter Ireland (and especially its involvement in reviewing feature proposals for compliance) which seems to have killed its GDPR OSS role.