You can break a country’s laws depending on whether or not you are ever going to go to that country, or what treaties your country has signed which might cause it to enforce other countries’ laws.
These GDPR conversations tend to pointlessly go back and forth on this because one side is describing the GDPR from the point of view of: what does the law say? The other is looking at it from the point of view of: I only have to follow my country’s laws.
The latter is closer to correct in some technical sense; laws have finite jurisdictions. But the EU has a big market and so lots of entities play ball with them, to some extent, in general, so it is probably better for most people to comply.
