I work with red teams and auditors as a blue team dev, and I don't think the documentation is necessarily because of excessive bureaucracy. It's because modern infrastructure is complicated as hell and it's several full time jobs just to translate what the red team finds into a systemic view of current weaknesses, and then to translate that into a plan that the inevitably outstretched blue team can actually act on. Writing things down is a critical part of making the problem tractable.

In my experience, being able to think clearly end to end is the hardest part of the whole operation, and the lack of that capability is the reason it feels like paperwork and mindless checklists.