"there's a tendency for American laws to be applied globally" - While that's true, not even the disgustingly anti-competitive DMCA forbids reverse engineering in cases like this.
"But it begs the question as to why this sort of thing isn't illegal" - It kinda is. The managers who ordered this ugliness might be charged with the felony of disrupting state infrastructure, which carries a light jail time in many parts of Europe, probably Poland too.
"Anyone remember Microsoft and CP/M-86?" - While I do hate all the shenanigans of Micro$oft it's still a private corporation and it didn't disable any government resources with their petty tricks. Which can't be said about this thing.