>more layers of abstraction needlessly added

I think you're betraying your bias here with the added term "needlessly". There is some (maybe even most) bureaucracy that is inefficiently applied, for sure. But it is meant to address some risk. Maybe it's a risk that you (personally) don't care about, or aren't even cognizant of, and that's when it becomes easy to declare it "needless." We should be looking to streamline our risk mitigation and align it with risks that the public cares about, not throw it out altogether.

You're betraying your bias by insinuating I suggested throwing out risk mitigation. I advocated for streamlined risk mitigation by highlighting the risk of unnecessary complexity.

Maybe you can point me to where you advocated for risk mitigation. Because you seemed to imply bureaucracy is sold as risk-mitigation under the mistaken assumption that it correlates with safety. Did I read it incorrectly and you are actually saying there is a truly positive correlation between safety and bureaucracy? Or maybe you have an opinion on what we should replace the current version with?

Now you only need to get expert consensus on which parts of the complexity are unnecessary.

That sounds an awful lot like industry standards and codes, which are often eschewed as the very bureaucracy the OP was railing against.

A true expert can streamline their industry every time. Simply because most people who make decisions on process are not experts in the relevant field, but expert administrators who often lazily apply existing policies to new concepts that they never got the training to understand or put into context.

Just look at any institutional review board: the breadth their expertise is always smaller than the relevant topics they will have to rule upon at the institution, and often that leads to a certain level of consternation, misplaced understanding of risk, and overall higher levels of inefficiency.

I have worked in a highly regulated industry before. I found the regulations that concerned me (safety critical software) to be quite good and rather too lax than too strict. I would be surprised if you could streamline nuclear power plant regulations by a lot without using losing safety.

OK, so then we just need to figure out how to identify a true expert and we're off to the races.