In many countries that's basically how it works. You file for permission, hand in all the paper work, maybe have a hearing or a period where the public can bring concerns, and once the project is approved it can go ahead and is very difficult to stop. But doing it that way means the approval process now has to capture all the nuances, bloating the process. Big projects go a lot smoother, but small projects nobody would care to object to become more expensive

It's an interesting trade off, and getting the right balance is difficult