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That's just how .eu has always worked? If you're not from the EU (okay EEA to be more precise), you can't have one. It was never open to those outside of it. It wasn't some "fuck you in particular" kind of deal you make it out to be, nothing changed in its requirements.

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Many made the (somewhat reasonable) assumption that it was for EUrope, not the European Union.

Sure, but it never was — the .eu domain was for the European Union from the beginning, and the ISO code EU is for the European Union. The .eu domain was opened by agreement to the EEA (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway) countries as well. But Swiss registrants have never been eligible (except via citizenship/residency in one of the qualifying states), for example.

When the UK left the EU, they didn't negotiate any EEA-style agreement to get access to .eu in their Brexit deal.

Those are confused with *.eu.org which is a predecessor of the .eu TLD. See https://nic.eu.org

Does that mean Swiss people cannot acquire .eu domains, as Switzerland is not part of the EU or EEA?

That is correct.

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