It is a weird subject - on the one hand, I don't think anyone would argue that the story in the article makes sense from a process perspective. But simultaneously the people who are of the opinion that the regulations burdens should be lightened seem to be in a political minority that can't be much bigger than around 30% of the population. Raising the question - what do the majority of voters actual think about this sort of regulation? Maybe they are just of the opinion that case studies like this aren't representative of reality.
I'd incline to believe that if the US body politic set out to solve this one they'd end up in a position of introducing a loophole for charging projects (ie, increasing bureaucracy) and reducing the regulatory burden wouldn't be an option.
I think most people have an opinion similar to NIMBYism. Everyone agrees there are too many regulations but no one agrees which ones are the extra. Every rule is someone's highest concern.
That's why part of the argument in Abundance is that current processes give too many people too much veto power. When every issue is someone's pet issue nothing can ever get done.
Regulations are like code of a program. It's the business logic of how we want the world to be.
Like all code, it can be buggy, bloated and slow, or it can be well-written and efficiently achieve ambitious things.
If you have crappy unmaintainable code that doesn't work, then deleting it is an obvious improvement.
Like in programming, it takes a lot of skill to write code that achieves its goals in a way that is as simple as possible, but also isn't oversimplified to the point of failing to handle important cases.
The pro-regulation argument isn't for naively piling up more code and more bloat, but for improving and optimizing it.