It's a paradox. The more complex a society becomes, the more rules it needs to govern behavior.
You seem to think that the complexity of our society is increasing?
I doubt. The various moral prescriptions people had to follow in the middle ages were much more complex than what we have today, at least in principle.
Of course, the various ideologist, today mostly from the left, are working hard to correct this, making our society regarding the complexity of the moral rules as complex as it was in the middle ages, with the various classes, religions, and professional standards of behaviour replaced by political correctness codes. But as a society, our society is rather trivial, a mass society, where everybody can behave in the same uneducated and uncivilized way in relation to everybody else.
A complex society is something completely different. It is a society with very different organizations - family, churchs, professional societies, clubs, salons, communities, all of them having power, with complex connections between these different power centers. The democratic society is, in comparison, a trivial one. Atomic individuals, and the state which regulates everything. Organizations and firms have no independent power, their statutes follow prescriptions of the state.
The reality is, of course, quite different, the US deep state is as complex as the society of the middle ages, with families, networks, lobbies, brotherhoods, firm conglomerates, media moguls and religious sects as independent power centers with complex interactions, but this complexity is something relevant inside the 1%, nothing for the 99% sheeple, and, paradox, this is the part of the society not governed by the government at all - it is the one governing it.
You try running something that big with simple rules. It's naive to think it's possible.
It is certainly not the pure number of people which makes the society complex - instead, the fact that in a society with too many people one simply cannot know much about the other people enforces a rigorous simplification.
A long time, there have been remains of civilization, thus, people have made complex differences, with rules of politeness being very different for men, women, children, depending on age, profession, religion as well as dress codes. This no longer exists, if one follows rules of polite behaviour, which make differences between men and women, one is called a sexist and so on. This deccline of culture and civilization, lead by gum chewing presidents, is a loss of complexity. People of the past have read much more literature, have been much more educated than today.
All those regulations are also not a description of complexity of the society. They are artificial restrictions of the free market with the aim to force the sheeple to buy what the established firms produce and to protect these firms from competition.
What else? The complexity of the technics requires a large subdivision of labor. But this subdivision does not at all need complex regulations. All one needs for this is quite simple, and was known already in the Roman empire. Contracts have to be fulfilled. Everything else is part of the contracts. It is really that simple. One needs secure ownership. This is also well-known, and the need for secure ownership existed also already in the middle ages.
And the most complex thing humanity has constructed - the internet - works essentially without any regulation at all. It is based on a simple technical protocol.
The other great success story of mankind - science - is also almost completely unregulated.
The more free we are, the more free we are to commit crimes and violence. Even when power is returned to local governments, they will find a need for a police force, otherwise the strongest group wins, and that group may not be very nice.
It is different: The strongest group wins, always. And is, after its victory, named police.
A state is considered free, if the difference between what only the state is allowed to do and what everybody is allowed to do is small.