If you're looking for a formula that lets you estimate once and then move on to the "real work" now that that tedious BS is out of the way, there isn't one. But you can still do something. There's ground between "I can't estimate that in 30 minutes" and "I can't estimate it at all" and it's up to you and your stakeholders to come to terms on how to balance the risks in your estimates (in broad terms: too inaccurate estimates vs too much time wasted estimating requirements that have since changed).
(There's a parallel theme in some other comments: "if it's a well-understood problem why am I not using the existing solution?" Similarly, there's a difference between "well-understood" and "perfectly abstractable and automatable", otherwise almost none of us would be employed these days. :) )
Certainly when you're writing a double-linked list a third time you can estimate how long will it take you. The problem is that in real life you never solve sufficiently the same well-solved problem. Feature details, matters of integration with other pieces of the system intervene - and in practice those errors introduced by new circumstances are significant comparing to predicted time. So the practice may be sound, but it doesn't give the desired results, like predictability of required time.