In terms of risk factors, most side projects will generally use data to provide a service to customers. This type of processing is unlikely to attract regulatory attention.
It's also unlikely that the vast majority of entities will be 100% compliant come May 25, but as the Belgian data protection authority has pointed out, it is important that people demonstrate a good faith approach to compliance.
For new requirements around restriction of processing/provision of data in a programmatic manner, again, dependent on risk, it is likely not necessary to implement these features and side project owners should focus on building their product instead.
Relevant risks for a side-project owner are around a) volume of data held, b) types of uses of data, c) likelihood of users making a requests around erasure/restriction (look at any historic requests received here), and d) regulatory focus on specific areas of the legislation.
This law is not going to fizzle out and on a general level, in my view it is advisable for any entity to look to respect user data regardless of legal obligations relating to that.