Several hours later, I'm trying to recover what I was thinking and am having a hard time doing so because I've kind of accepted the sense he's using the term in (ie let's paper over the legal details so that we can focus on things that are actually interesting). I think it was the last use, the one you quoted, that really had me scratching my head. But now that I've adopted the skewed/innovative definition I'm having a hard time re-seeing what I was finding an issue with.

It's perversely horrible if you think about the original meaning of paper in paper over (wallpaper), and imagine legal contracts covering the walls of a room - unfortunately quite close to the "reality" that we find ourselves increasingly operating in.