The point of the system is what it does.

They can't just say "we don't want to deal with small timers who will not pay us big bucks doing nonstandard things" without pushback but they can write the policy so that a huge fraction of those use cases fall into some crack that can only be got out of by incurring the kind of expense that's a non-starter for those users. Your municipal code is rife with examples of this.

This is a catchy aphorism, but not really true. Things can be badly implemented so that they fail to achieve their purpose.