This phenomena has plenty of analogues in the corporate & government worlds as well. A formal performance review system is instituted to keep people from spend

This phenomena has plenty of analogues in the corporate & government worlds as well. A formal performance review system is instituted to keep people from spending all their time sucking up to their boss, and then is progressively refined to deter all the ways that it has been gamed, until it is very well adapted to preventing the historical forms of gaming the system but bears no relation at all to incentivizing good business results. A codebase gets a series of bugfixes, until it ends up slow and impossible to maintain, and then is thrown away when a competitor adapts to market conditions faster. A new government bureaucracy is formed to identify and prevent all the ways that terrorists could bring down airliners, and only serves to violate flyers' privacy and add millions of hours to accumulated travel time. The root cause, I think, is that humans are really bad at considering both the specific and the general in their decision-making. A new procedure might perfectly solve the problem you're having right now, but the cumulative effect of all these new procedures is to make the overall system useless. Long-lasting systems provide for ways to throw away whole parts of the system and replace them with something simpler, without throwing away the system itself. Whole industries get outcompeted by a nimble startup. Codebases get refactored, and gnarly subsystems deprecated and replaced with clean interfaces. Elected officials get thrown out of office. Perhaps the right way to look at this is to embrace change, and position yourself as the destroyer and replacer of systems that have become overcomplicated and bloated. That's why the tech and finance industries have been so highly compensated over the last 20 years: together, they're throwing away whole parts of the 1980/90s institutions that had become bloated through 40-50 years of progressive micro-optimization.