Having looked into this, it’s only partly an issue of spaghetti towers. The more important reason that you get absurd page counts, however, is that tax codes are written in legalese. I saw the same thing happen when I worked in equity derivatives pricing, where a simple options contract for a call can easily be described in (at most) 10 lines of code, or expressed as a one-line equation. Instead, however, the legal terms are actually written as this 188 page pamphlet; https://www.theocc.com/components/docs/riskstoc.pdf which is (technically but not enforced to be a) legally required reading for anyone who wants to purchase an exchange traded option. And don’t worry—it explicitly notes that it doesn’t cover the actual laws governing options, for which you need to read the relevant US code, or the way in which the markets for trading them work, or any of the risks.
Having looked into this, it’s only partly an issue of spaghetti towers. The more important reason that you get absurd page counts, however, is that tax codes are written in legalese. I saw the same thing happen when I worked in equity derivatives pricing, where a simple options contract for a call can easily be described in (at most) 10 lines of code, or expressed as a one-line equation. Instead, however, the legal terms are actually written as this 188 page pamphlet; https://www.theocc.com/components/docs/riskstoc.pdf which is (technically but not enforced to be a) legally required reading for anyone who wants to purchase an exchange traded option. And don’t worry—it explicitly notes that it doesn’t cover the actual laws governing options, for which you need to read the relevant US code, or the way in which the markets for trading them work, or any of the risks.