The better question you should ask is: who determined that number and put it in their paper with a straight face?
Yes, the section on wording in P2900 is physically 56 pages. That's not 56 pages of new wording though.
For those unaware: Wording is always presented as a diff to the working draft. Apart from new sections that have to be added for contracts, those 56 pages replicate existing pages of the draft verbatim as context for their changes, which often boil down to: adding a bullet point to a list (e.g. extending the list of keywords), adding a sentence to a pre-existing paragraph (e.g. extending the syntax for lambdas), etc.
You could probably condense the wording down quite a bit, it would be harder to follow what is going on with the changes, but apparently that's what some people who just count page numbers would prefer.
Two papers that both have the same authors, one of whom is Bjarne Stroustrup.
Why are you convinced the narrative is that contracts are actually broken and unfixable instead of a few influential people just really hate it for reasons they have been unable to convince anyone else are valid?
Have you read the "contracts fundamental flaws" paper? Looking at it now, it's hard to take it seriously. The biggest complaint seems to be that the marketing of contracts is wrong. Literally: "We would welcome a contracts design that is simple, and “marketed” as just a debug aid, rather than a safety feature."
It really does look like Bjarne is convinced that profiles are the future for C++, and contracts makes it less appealing to get there. And that's something that reasonable minds can just disagree about without it being a conspiracy of some kind. WG21 doesn't seem to believe that profiles are an anytime-soon-if-ever feature, and contracts provide immediate benefit that justifies any future complications with profiles.