Even if you pretend the distance between voters and decision makers doesn't matter, here's a simple test: did your countries elected official vote for von der Leyen? You don't know the answer because the process by which she was selected is totally opaque by design. We don't even know if there was a vote at all. We don't know why she was selected. The MEPs were given a choice of her or nobody else. So please don't tell people that the EU is democratic or made up of "officials appointed by elected officials".

"If UK wants to block travel and resident rights of EU citizens and keep access into EU markets"

The EU granted residency rights automatically to everyone from the EU who was living there, and the EU still told everyone in the country to fuck off - including millions of those so-called "EU citizens" whose so-called rights suddenly stopped mattering.

But this is really a sideshow. The fact is, nobody in Europe was going on protest marches about USB-C or kettle speeds. The EU spends time on this stuff because it's made up of powerful but bubble-living bureaucrats who don't care and don't have to care about what matters to everyone else.