Summary: The chaos left by Team Battistelli is more than a decade old and it's nowhere near resolved; the way things are going, it's more likely that the EPO will get dissolved for being captured by people who undermine the EPO's goals/mission and now attempt to do the very same thing to patent courts all across Europe
They don't care about the users and issuing a few bytes with random characters costs them next to nothing. It gives them control over billions of human beings.
If even one media outlet told you in 2010 that Microsoft would fall from 100% (of Web requests) to about 1 in 8 Web requests, you'd probably struggle to believe it