Brexit is on the European establishment that couldn't stop itself from pushing "ever closer union". A competently executed trade union would do. Their overbearing desire to rule Europe was bound to eventually piss off someone. They could still have a competently executed trade union, provided all the people who want to throw sand in the gears for spite are eliminated from negotiation and implementation.
I don't disagree to a certain extent, but previously the UK at least had a say in the rules, and seemed to have an outsized influence on EU direction compared to their actual contributions.
Now if they want to trade in the EU, they have to have their products conform to EU standards, with zero input into what those are, and are basically in the same boat as us. It's not a big deal for us, as we follow the US closely and can do the paperwork to jump into their standards easily enough, but when you can see Europe mainland across the Channel and a massive proportion of the trade goes to Europe, this is a bit like NAFTA suddenly being voided and Canadian companies suddenly required to do a massive amount of paperwork to ship anything into the US (and vice versa). So the EU rules will still apply to a huge portion of their exports (particularly the really difficult stuff like food and livestock) but now they have to do inspections and customs forms, so it's put companies effectively out of business for EU trade.
For all their contributions, the EU was doing something like $5B a year in investment in the UK, which was a broad range of things like actual infrastructure projects, program grants etc, plus all the pooled STEM programs, and things like the ERASMUS uni exchange programs.
No idea why the UK went for a 'hard Brexit' but the Northern Ireland protocol of not having a border only works when they are in a trade union, so a border at either the Irish Sea or between Ireland and Northern Ireland are the only other options. They could have potentially stayed within the trade union, but decided not to. Now that COVID is stabilizing and the new normal, really exposing how absolutely crushing this has been to existing businesses, as well as the woefully inadequate 'new business opportunities that they've taken back control' really is.
Bit of a joke if they think they have any real barganing power; they are coming to everyone hat in hand and somehow thinking they'll get favourable free trade agreements. I don't think they've had any new free trade agreements since Brexit, and the ones they've agreed to have been fairly lopsided for the other countries to access the UK market.
Maybe some toffs have benefitted from ongoing money laundering and shell company activies, but it's been a slow disaster for the average Brit and only going to get worse.