Are you a happy B2?

[Le Baron]

B2 seems to me the natural place to slacken off formal 'study' outside of an exam scenario. At this point you've acquired the tools to progress in an independent way by consuming newspapers and other media with relative ease. Discussions are also accumulative like a rolling snowball, because you are no longer focusing so much on learning and remembering regular structure and words, so it's just incremental additions enriching what you already have.

In the EU B2 is considered the level accepted for most (if not all) university admissions. We might question if this would adequately equip every B2 applicant (I would), but they accept it and that's that.

Most of the foreign speakers I've met in EU countries (to where they've immigrated) have often gone through some process to get to about B2, then they've become a user of the language(s) and carried on up the incline. Any learner would listen to these people talking and think 'wow! fluency!' A lot of people, not everyone, but a lot, pass into about C1 level naturally a few years after hitting 'B2'. I think after that, unless you need specialised language or a certificate, a person could burn all their learning materials as though they never existed.