The reason this topic continually comes up is that people in the US are stupid and bad at math, and the IRS is very heavy-handed and issues penalties for minor tax errors, so people are afraid to interact with the process without a trusted intermediary.
The irs is neither heavy handed nor particularly quick to issue penalties.
There is an extremely effective and powerful alliance between certain republican politicians and tax industry corporations that work to convince people taxes are hard and the gov can't do them and they need an agent.
It works.
Then they do that... again. At some point they probably put your name on some kind of list of Bad Taxpayers but unless we're talking millions here they probably aren't sending agents after you in specific.
I enter my credit card number, and pay. That's all.
Same for other stuff like housing tax, too.
For most people in the US, filing their taxes is a very simple process, which is why it's so annoying that Intuit has successfully lobbied to integrate themselves into the process.