My father did environmental, health, and safety compliance for a manufacturing operation for 21 years. Simple guidelines would work fine for a lot of things if

My father did environmental, health, and safety compliance for a manufacturing operation for 21 years. Simple guidelines would work fine for a lot of things if you could trust that the rules were just to advise thoughtful and non-malicious people. But there's always somebody too stupid or amoral to infer that "don't let this stuff get in workers' eyes" also implies "don't let workers apply this stuff without protective eyewear," so every detail has to be explicit. Sometimes the people trying to get away with something are in the executive suite; sometimes they're just forklift operators. For most rules in the rulebook, you can bet that somebody once did the dumb thing the book is now explicitly telling you not to do. That's usually why it got added as a rule. I'm sure it is a burden to have such large accumulations of rules, particularly if 4 out of 5 are just telling you to do things that any reasonably careful person would already be doing. I don't see how to reduce that burden while also not introducing exploitable loopholes for bad actors.