>It's not that each individual, well-intentioned regulation is bad (though some are), it's that many regulations intersect and create edge cases.
We would never excuse such ignorance of 2nd through Nth order consequences in any other context. Can you imagine "the catholic church wasn't trying to provide cover for abusers, that was just an accidental side effect of protecting their own image"? That'd be laughable.
So why does government get the pass?
I don't necessarily think the problem is not forgetting about consequences. It's more about the confluence of rules.
I remember playing a game where one card you drew let you ban a word for the duration of the game. If you said that word, you'd lose points in the game.
In the beginning, it leads to funny moments. But as more and more (at least somewhat common) words get banned, people just stop talking altogether and communicate the minimum because everything becomes a minefield.
It's obviously a flawed analogy, but I think the overall point holds:
Even if the rules are merely arbitrary and have no real effect whatsoever (such as banning a word for the next 15 minutes), the rules don't just get rid of the words but keep up overall conversation, they eventually kill the conversation itself.
The same goes for regulation. Even if zoning laws, environmental reviews, vendor evaluations and design specifications and community surveys are all individually useful, their confluence creates a knot that makes it impossible to build 8 EV chargers.