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Well, besides refusing to consider ultimately-accepted Irish border inspection measures for several years, selective laxening of migrant enforcement across the channel, coordinated media campaigns, grouping in various European projects the British were already paying members of that don't require EU membership to renegotiation as part of the broader trade deal negotiations, immediate objection on safety grounds of standards that were still in alignment at arbitrary cutoff dates, and deliberate demands for politically unviable demands that led to the collapse of the entire pro-EU British establishment when they tried to actually deliver a Brexit-in-name-only but which were dropped afterwards.
As a project to actually keep Britain in the European orbit, as was initially attempted by trying to offer an exceptional number of 'you can change your mind' avenues and the May BINO terms while heightening the prospects of departure with numerous techhniques, the EU position was a bumbling failure of trying to not-lose one of their most significant strategic-relevance contributors, and ended up in the impressive result of starting with a Parliamentary practical-majority of Remainers to negotiate with at the start changing to a hard-Brexit wave. As a secondary effort to try and keep the EU together, it was a decent success, albeit missing the obvious third order effects for how Euroskeptical states would adjust policy on the expectation of staying in the EU.
That there were options the EU could have done and didn't does not mean that they weren't also options that the Europeans didn't have to do, but did.
Of course not. It was just formal policy by various European leaders to show that exiting the EU would hurt anyone more than staying in, while taking multiple efforts to undermine confidence in the departed member's business environment, maintaining various European Union media campaigns continuing cultivate Brexit messaging themes years after macro-economic trends surpassed it, and post-Brexit attempts by the German and French governments to try to centralize power in European institutions they collectively dominated in the absence of British obstruction.
Things do not need to be shadowy plots to be confluence of interests between parties. 'Soft Brexit' was never going to be an option due to interests, not technical impossiblity.
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