That's the negative side. The opposite is, which anyone who ran some kind of group activity or forum should have experience with, is when someone obnoxious plays rules lawyering to slip out of everything. In the end you just have to leave it at a vibes-based reasoning. Yes, it can be abused. The explicit, written rules variant can be abused in opposite ways. It's all tradeoffs.
I land on the point of the tradeoff spectrum where you have some "instructions" and rules, but it's also a "spirit of the rules" kind of thing, and someone has the means to exercise subjective judgment, instead of trying to fully eliminate subjectivity in favor of ever growing rules with ever growing exceptions that become a maze to navigate, and can become its own form of tyranny, especially if someone has the power to arbitrarily decide which set of rules to choose to apply for each case.
You can have the best processes and rules, if the people are bad. You can't compensate for that. And if you have good people, you can and should allow them some range of judgment.