No system is perfect, and sometimes we need to acknowledge that unsavory unintended consequences do exist.

I recently went to a european country with similar laws and was talking to an american ex-pat woman running the tour I signed up for. She said when she first decided to stay a while in this country and started looking for jobs, people were asking her strangely personal questions like how serious she was with her boyfriend. Only after she took her maternity leave a few years later did she realize they were actually gauging how big a maternity leave risk she was going to be while not quite asking her that outright because that would be technically illegal.

The kicker is now she was running her own small tourist business, and she flat out said that she would think long and hard about hiring a woman in her 20's for the exact same reason. In this country she would have to pay a person taking maternity leave out of pocket for up to a year and the government would reimburse her a year or two after the person comes back. The issue was that for a small 3-4 person operation, losing a person for a year while paying whatever % of salary is a significant risk to the business -- she wasn't sure she could stay afloat while waiting for the government to reimburse her (plus this was a mediteranean government not known for german levels of solvency...)

None of this is to say any of this is right or just, but it's just a first-hand tourist story I got that shows it's difficult to create a system that works (at least if "works" is defined solely as "maximizing business growth"). Even if something is formally illegal doesn't mean it doesn't appear as some of the informal mental calculus, and an honest discussion about this would say "yes, these policies can impact business growth and have unintended consequences." The followup conversation no one in the US is willing to have, though, is should we really be fetishizing business growth above all else?