Personally I think a right for the players to check the records (including captures) to the scribe on the site is enough. The Japanse live game had the same, and I’ve seen pros in their games just checking when they want to (this I think is one of the interesting “customs” I heard from Japanese players, they sit on the ground, and the lid or bowl are below their line of sight from the opponents, so they learn to count based on shapes, and if they had questions, just go ask the scribe)
I actually don’t object if there are subjective ones listed, but not with them listed alongside actions-only based regulations without specific intents. They are not in the section regarding players rights and behaviors, which actually are in the rules (articles 13, 14, etc.). But they then include these supposedly guidelines into the warnings and penalty section by referencing them and then adding subjective judgment into them by giving referees immense power to interpret them.
I’ve looked through the old ones and how they slowly added and reorganized these rules (you can see the old ones here) and compared them. Lots of the more strange ones like the “delay of the game” and this “place a stone on the lid” are added, while some clearly mark intent regulations changed (like a warning can be given to players or managers who raise objections that are irrelative or false, and replaced with the referee can determine the objections as they deemed, not even mentioned who can raise objections or the validity of the objections). You can even see the shortening of the rules even after adding new ones like the lid rule, because they simply remove the subjects and objects of the sentence and only list the actions themselves.
If this is not deliberately vague I don’t know what I would call it. I agree they must have put effort into making them and adding them, as the rules-supplemented materials had shown multiple change dates. However, if you look through the history using the archive, the trend is pretty clear. The effort of painstakingly adding rules and regulations has been slowly turning and changing to make it more opaque in recent years (especially after 2018).
There is one coincident that the 3rd day’s referee was the chairman (one of the youngest) of the Baduk professional player associations elected in 2018 to 2020, and it was at the time when the Korean Baduk Association was in the battle with Lee Sedol to take control over the behaviors of the professional Go players with his retirement controversy. They want to control the professional Go players’ behaviors and even go to court. I cannot help to wonder if the purpose behind all the changes had more political reasons to make interfering and controlling the games easier, and recently more and more commercialized game competition environments. This incident is just the surface of the changing system within KBA that is reflected.