Despite living in Berlin, my grasp of politics is also terrible.
However, while I can’t say either way if she’s good at other things or not, the headlines aren’t going to answer that either way — news only covers emotionally charged events, and outside science, tech, and weather forecasts, that in turn makes everyone look bad most of the time.
But the EU is super conservative - e.g. banning gene edited crops (now available in Brexit Britain at last - https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61537610 ), the ridiculous cookie laws and GDPR restrictions, etc.
Go live in the south of Germany and see how conservative it is - no card payments, little online delivery, a huge amount of bureaucracy, etc. And the EU forces that sort of bureaucratic conservatism on the whole of Europe, even though some countries like the UK, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, etc. are much more liberal and technologically progressive.
While I would accept the EU is small-C conservative about GM, that was in response to public opinion — IIRC, every rule predating the Lisbon Treaty (2007) necessarily had unanimous (and not merely majority of both nations and people represented by those nations) support from the governments of the member states — and even then the EU doesn’t ban GM crops but rather it regulates them, and the UK had some such crops (and experiments) before leaving:
Indeed, the reason I as a vegetarian can have hard cheese is the use of GM bacterial rennet (not a crop, no idea how that changes the regulation rules).
As for card payments, even in Berlin they are less common than in the U.K. prior to Brexit, but that variance by itself (and the increasingly cashless orientation of Sweden) demonstrates the EU isn’t being held back by German skepticism of non-cash money.
Likewise in reverse (and to show this isn’t just an EU thing), when I visited California, I was shocked by how primitive and backward the payment systems were, especially given California has a reputation for being technologically progressive.
However, even if I were to accept all of your claims, this makes little difference in either direction to my opinion of specifically Ursula von der Leyen, as questions of competence are a separate axis to each of liberty-vs-rules and dynamic-vs-conservative and left-vs-right.
Edit: also, GDPR is in this context basically the same as the UK’s Data Protection Act 1998, it is just that nobody outside the U.K. paid any attention to the U.K. acting alone.
However, while I can’t say either way if she’s good at other things or not, the headlines aren’t going to answer that either way — news only covers emotionally charged events, and outside science, tech, and weather forecasts, that in turn makes everyone look bad most of the time.