Of course, the fact that something is ridiculous doesn't prevent a sovereign country from trying to do it anyway. Iran can threaten to assassinate you for communicating with their citizens, and France can threaten to jail you if you ever travel to France or extradite you. Both of those threats are unjustified in my opinion and should not be supported or condoned by other countries (particularly not the US), but like I said; they're sovereign countries so we can't do much to stop them if they want to be unreasonable.
If you are serving people in Iran or France then you are operating in those countries regardless of where you or your servers are and so you do have to comply with their laws or risk facing the consequences.
Now, depending on where you are at the reach of the consequences can be negligible and not impact you at all or can be a major problem.
At minimum you will get your service banned in those countries.
If someone physically flew over from Iran and talked to me in-person instead of over the internet would you make the same argument? That I'm "operating in Iran" and should be subject to Iranian law because I'm talking to an Iranian citizen? What if it was via a letter? How about a phone call?