>There is quite a strong incentive for the 'expert' to say you 'need to do X' when they will get paid for doing it.

Even if they're not being paid for the work they're still gonna be conservative to cover their own ass because they're accountable to their own licensing board or there's some 3rd party government or perhaps private stats tracking their screw ups or whatever.

This is what you get when you have a subset of the general public hellbent on requiring that nothing get done without consulting a dozen different licensed professionals oversight by multiple departments, etc, etc.

In a "simple" evaluation of incentives there is no incentive to cut the tree if it's not a fairly undeniable hazard but the simplicity has been polluted with a complex spaghetti of requirements.