I was im the UK in 2017 and what gave me the crawlies was the realization that the whole “right to stay” would be nothing more than an entry in a gov database which could be verified by employers and landlords with a temporary URL.
No paper, no real document you’d have, not even some stamp in your passport. Your whole life depending on a byte in a data base kept by an unfriendly government.
A second group (size unknown) was also notified that “there may have been a mistake”, and then His Majesty’s fucking morons declined to follow up.
So there’s a whole bunch more people who are currently hoping that this number isn’t going to increase with them.
Also let’s not forgot some EU citizens were denied the right to vote for their last british representants in the European parliament. (people usually had the choice to vote either in their district of residency or via letter in the ballots of their birth country).
There were still eu citizens left in the UK? Had not expected them to last that long there. Impressive.