I've worked with US and EU companies extensively over many years and my experience is that low (it depends greatly where you are what this means) tech salaries have effectively nothing to do with EU privacy regulation, and everything to do with historical cost of living and culture, and the large amount of inertia it takes to change especially the latter.

There are businesses in the US that rely on wafer thin privacy regulation to exploit people's data, but it's very very possible to build a business that doesn't require it to function.