what you write is true, but very concerning.

in theory, laws and policies are crafted by elected officials or experts, and bureaucrats are just the executors. but in reality, bureaucracies interpret, refine, and sometimes even reshape these rules through policy implementation. this is where a lot of inefficiency, red tape, and unintended consequences creep in.

That hardly ever works or did ever work in reality. Almost no legislation (unless it solves and issue that is very straightforward) is written with such granularity that would makes this possible.

The people writing it are not necessarily subject experts in the area and even if they were or consulted such experts they can't foresee all eventualities. So those laws would need to be constantly updated all the time which is simply infeasibly (especially in the US where the legislative branch is stuck in a near permanent gridlock by design). IMHO that would make the system much, much more inefficient.

It's impossible to tell the difference between inefficiency and a timing hack unless you're deep in the guts of a system. Civic maintenance of snow plows can be a good real-world example.