Bureaucracy isn’t a bad decision. It’s an accumulation of reasonable ones.
The first rule made sense. The fifth made sense. The twentieth is still defensible on its own. Together they’ve built a wall between teams and the actual work.
I’ve watched a Platform team become the bottleneck for an entire org this way. Nobody made a bad call. The system drifted.
The habit worth building isn’t “fight bureaucracy”. It’s smaller. When a rule is added, ask what it would cost to remove the one next to it. If nobody can answer, that’s the rule that doesn’t belong.