I think this depends on the spec language and the target system. I’ve never encountered a spec more complicated than the program as the goal is always abstracti

I think this depends on the spec language and the target system. I’ve never encountered a spec more complicated than the program as the goal is always abstraction but I don’t mean to discount your experiences and complexity is affected by tooling familiarity and quality. Separately the spec can often have its own properties which can be verified as a means to interrogate its correctness. For example state machines as spec, temporal logic properties and model checking where the state machine is the abstraction for a concrete system. Worth noting that proving state machines are an abstraction of a concrete system is a going research concern though.