A company that has to "follow the rules" is way less desirable to work for then a company that embraces the spirit of the rules. I'm in the US so can't really speak for companies in other countries, but many US companies are doing everything they can to skirt the letter of the law and spending a ton of money to have them rewritten to be less favorable to employees and more favorable to the business. Finding a company that truly cares for employees is a very rare treat!
It's a fundamental problem with large organizations.
In principle, an organization that is built on reciprocal loyalty is more productive than one that treats people as interchangeable cogs, because people are individually happier and go to greater lengths to achieve the shared goals, making them more productive. However, this arrangement can only be built on trust, and trust doesn't scale well past the Dunbar number. Thus, spirit of the rules is replaced by letter of the rules (which can be meaningfully enforced).
Thus, the larger the bureaucracy, the more soulless it is even in individual interactions between people within it, and the more it treats those people as interchangeable cogs that are there solely to serve the overall function of the organization. If the organization is a for-profit corporation, its overall function is profit, and thus megacorps always tend to optimize squeezing their employees.
Short-term this can be reversed somewhat if leadership is concentrated and opinionated. E.g. when the company grows out of a startup dominated by a single founder, and that founder has certain ethical standards or beliefs that they enforce on the org, overriding the natural tendency. This arrangement never lasts long-term, though - either the founder goes away and is replaced by generic management which has neither the desire nor the capacity to go against the current, or the founder becomes corrupt.
That's absolutely happening in US-owned companies in EU that used to be great places to work before they became US-owned. They do pay a premium for their bullshit of course.