> I built my house without any inspection or licensing and connected to the electric grid without anyone from the government ever even looking at it or taking money for it.

That's... not common (perhaps more-so in rural areas).

In my area, being connected to the grid brings a lot more hassle: the utility gets a say in how much solar you can build, as well as how it's connected. Some of it makes sense (they want to make sure you're not going to backfeed during an outage and cause a hazard to linemen), but a lot of it is them protecting their bottom line.

Interesting. My utility let me do my own service entrance and everything. They didn't even give a shit what I connected it to. I ended up powering a whole house and a trailer without anyone from the power company even looking at either of them (I added them after I built a 200 amp service entrance as just a stubbed entrance with no load).

If I added a solar system they would neither care nor have any idea. Only the government cares here.

It's not about them protecting their bottom line. It's about managing the supply-demand balance to within the tight tolerances required to operate the grid stably . You can't just let an unconstrained new amount of generation come online and maintain a stable grid.