If the rules don't make sense for a situation why do they apply? Why isn't there a carve out?

It's easy to screech about potentially unforeseeable future cases and precedents but it's not like this stuff is free.

The cost of this attitude applied at scale is mind boggling.

There are carve-outs. They're just pretty general so human judgement can be applied to the odd edge cases - "at the discretion of the Secretary of State" sort of things.

Random example: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/31/101.8