My very blue collar brother in law became a code enforcement employee for his rich as fuck town for a while. The ONLY people who bitch about building codes are the ones who are CLEARLY out of compliance with code, have been for decades, and have been getting a pass due to nepotism previously, and then they have the time and spite to go to town office meetings and publicly bitch about their previous privileged status and wanting to keep that stupid level of privilege. Everyone else is mostly in compliance, trying to keep compliant, and will definitely get a pass from an enforcement official because it's clearly not a problem. If you don't act like a dick, you will almost always get a pass if it's not a clear violation that probably would fuck someone over in the future.

My father is a completely self taught and self employed contractor for the exact same area. Code compliance is so clear, simple, and easy that he considers it a rubber stamp process and has never complained about it, while he happily complains about spending $400 a year to keep his business properly licensed in the state, while he refuses to increase his prices to keep up with the gouging local contractors are able to do because of extremely high demand.

A rich town where everyone just afford compliance with everything all the time isn't very illustrative. I bet nobody there drives cars on bald tires or pays their babysitter off the books either.

In places where money doesn't grow on trees harder decisions have to be made. Situations like "do I hire a real electrician to install my heat pump and get forced to bring my panel up to current code at great expense or do I hire someone to just install the heat pump on a cash basis or do I replace my existing system like for like" become more common.

I agree code is stupid simple if you're building cookie cutter stuff. It can get very, very, annoying when you're dealing with systems that have N generations of changes and/or are trying to be minimally invasive. Would you rather take a hole saw to the main beam of someone's house or have a sink drain that's a hair too flat for a portion of it's run?