Sometimes these things make sense, but a lot of the time the work was already recently completed 3 years ago and yet they'll make you do it again. Last month I paid $3,900.00 to get 3 tiny trees and one medium sized oak surveyed here in the Bay Area. It's really about politics and control- the city wants to make a bunch of fake jobs and collect very high fees along the way.
Removing a requirement might just leave someone else paying a much higher price, potentially with their property, their clean water, or even their life.
So the real answer is to reframe laws as applying to commercial operations, projects over a certain size, non-homeowners, etc. But of course the corpos cry foul over this, and would much rather you put your effort into working to repeal all regulations so they can operate without constraints.
Pragmatically, this is why I live in an area where if I wake up and decide I don't like a particular tree, it can be on the ground within a couple of hours. And most of that time is eating breakfast.