It seems US is way more overregulated when it comes to electricity or building in general.

And every time I see a video online of a dance floor or stadium collapsing or people getting electrocuted by accidentally touching ungrounded electrical devices I'm reminded why. That's not to say those things don't happen here, just at a lower frequency. Safety standards are written in blood after all.

Structure collapses are extremely rare, which is why they are always news. I am not unhappy with the state of regulation when it comes to building structures that have the potential to kill hundreds or thousands of people at a time.

However I think many locations in the US way overdo regulation when it comes to residential building codes. When you buy a house, you get a professional inspection. If it comes up dangerous, then you are armed with the knowledge to make a risk decision that’s right for you.

I don’t need spacecraft level engineering on my car; similarly i don’t need skyscraper level engineering on my house.

Presumably you pull out a report and do a rundown of all the not to spec electrical work before any guests enter the house? Or are you making the safety call for them too?

And vice versa, do you ask any hosts whose house you are about to enter whether they have any out-of-spec electrical work before entering the house?

You could leave off everything after “overregulated” and still be correct.

might be easier to add a new circuit

Are you certain about that?

I’m having a new service entry cable, meter box, and main breaker panel put in next week. By its nature that should impact every single circuit in my house. But my electrician isn’t touching anything besides what I listed above, and I know that there are multiple other things around the house not up to current code.

You may live in a place where the law doesn't require that. Or you may have found an electrician willing to turn a blind eye to that stuff. Or you might be about to get a far larger bill than expected when the electrician 'discovers' that midway through the job, and now isn't legally allowed to put it back as he found it.

I’m in NY, US and and the proper permit was pulled for the job, as well as hiring an independent inspector to check the work when finished. My particular electrician has been doing business for ~30 years so I doubt he’s risking violations over things like that, plus he would have to be colluding with the inspector. He already did an inspection of the work needed and planned it, it would be impossible for him to suddenly notice other things that need to be done.

The price I’m paying for this job lines right up with the national job average pricing you can find online. If it was common to require doing all of that extra code updating I would think the average price should be much higher.

Maybe I’m wrong but my thought is that it isn’t so black+white and some electricians may push upsells harder than other more honest ones.

would you mind sharing a link to that resource. Is there a union rate webpage or something of the like where you can dial in your region and type of work etc like an online calculator or is there just some table printed somewhere online?

You have an electrician and AHJ that understands the NEC correctly. In this case, there are explicit exceptions written in code (210.12(B)), but that's an exception to a new part of code. In the general case, replacing like-for-like is permitted, so long as the original met code at the time of installation.

This is not correct for my city...