Where does "the system was cooked up by assholes a long time ago and far far away to the benefit of incumbent interests and the local enforcers will do literally anything so long as they can maintain plausible deniability and their paychecks" fall on this scale?

Because that's how this stuff works most of the time except in places where the incumbent interests dominate and everyone is rich enough to believe their own BS.

There's a tendency within certain filter bubbles to portray other parts of the world as blindly law following even including the spirit of the law as a means toward making some point to the tune of saying that people (presumably more local) who don't do that to their own detriment are wrong, bad, whatever. Nobody blindly follows the law to their own detriment unless they're indoctrinated to the point of ignorance. People comply just enough to keep the threats of violence away.