> Huge amount of risk and cost on founders

Better than potentially putting risk and costs on other companies, the country and/or it's citizens.

> nonsense to protect against the perceived risk

It's not a perceived risk. No rule is made without cases.

> No rule is made without cases

I can generally reverse engineer from the UK Companies Act what the cases were, but many EU countries have much more onerous requirements for what seems like no good reason? Perhaps the cases were too long in the past and things work differently now? What risks are we talking about, anyway?