Also you would of thought the EU would of accepted the UKs request of bringing GDPR into scope of the trade agreement and therefore not making it a third country (which is insane as the UK has the exact same GDPR in Law with no intention of removing it, we could of codified that the UK would keep it inline with the EUs version and forgo/have to renegotiate it's trade deal if it removes it).
You can't escape "third country" status with a trade deal, though.
As in, this is base EU law. At best, you could get some agreement which would be accepted to treat UK as acceptable party for GDPR-conscious business, but you're still a third party, and navigating patchwork agreements is why some companies will want to deal with company completely in EU instead.
Who says? The EU. There are other statuses that exist like EFTA and so on that don't have this issue, there's no reason at all why this couldn't be agreed (except that the EU haven't the incentive to make this work, quite the opposite).
"Third country" is a term of EU law in this case, and refers to one country's status with regards to EU law - including how entities in EU can deal with them.
Indeed. Creating imagined barriers where nobody (eu companies/citizens, uk companies/citizens, or the uk government) actually wants or needs them. In practice IMO they are just there because they're incentivised to make things difficult for us.
