Zoning should keep 1) noises 2) smells and 3) dangerous things away from where people live and schools and such. Not keep a 6-plex out of a neighborhood with luxury single family units. Or stop people from building on 1500 square foot lots.

I couldn't even build a simple 10x10 deck 12 inches from the ground without having to perform $8,000 worth of work to pour concrete piers and do several other destructive things to existing structures that make no sense.

This was for a deck that was going to be used by 1-2 people at a time, that could be built for $1000 worth of materials.

Same thing doubly applies for housing, except the numbers are 10-50x higher, because Karen in Bumfuck Permitting Services can't fathom that it's not necessary to build a single family dwelling up to Fort Knox standards, especially when it's made out of sticks and drywall anyway. It's almost like the code is designed to be especially convoluted to be a make-work program for local contractors.

From what I understand Wyoming outside the cities may be the closest to what you want, there’s basically rules about setback and not much else.

Yes, I'm aware that moving out of city limits tends to relax the building code & zoning a little bit. Planning to do that eventually.

But it was just an example of a thing that can contribute to rising construction/housing costs. I don't think it's particularly helpful to tell a young person "whoopsie, we could have built housing for you, but thanks to the last 10 recent code updates, the house is now 2x as expensive and you can't afford it".