The laws of international football are relatively simple, and include a decent amount of discretion for the referee. As a referee, I like it; it gives me the ability to appropriately control a match without taking it over. The game is supposed to be free flowing, not stopping and starting like Americans are used to in baseball, football, and basketball. That means not calling ticky tack stuff, unless required to prevent emotions from spiraling out of control.
Of course, one impact of empowering the referee with discretion is the players try to sell everything as a foul, leading to what everyone makes fun of about footballers diving, which is a legit complaint.
And there is no discretion on some things--like the offside call. In the world of VAR, that leads to some surprising results, like the disallowed goal Ecuador scored (or not) against Qatar. That situation was surely not the reason for the offside law, but because there is no discretion there, no goal. On the other hand, without VAR, that goal never gets called back.
The added time thing is another part of this. Referees aren't supposed to add time for ordinary breaks in play, except for substitutions, actual injuries (referees generally give a moment to see if it's actually an injury), and time wasting by one side. This is all discretionary, too--in part to not reward players for feigning injury. Again, I like the discretion, but it can lead to some strange results.
I also like that--outside of NCAA and high school soccer in the U.S.--there is no countdown clock on a play. The referee gives attacking teams the opportunity to finish out a play. In the context of the game, that's a fair way to approach it. That wouldn't work in a sport like basketball, where teams score every few seconds of the game, but in a low scoring game like soccer, it makes more sense.
In the abstract, our desire as sports fans for perfection on application of the rules troubles me. The sport, including the officials, is made up of human competition. We should strive to get things right, but we also shouldn't expect perfection. Obviously that's a slippery slope to argue, and I can appreciate the professional leagues trying to get things as close to perfectly right as possible, but one problem with that is the trickle down effect it has on local competition, where we will never have VAR, and referees will always make mistakes. In an era of expected perfection, I think fans are less tolerant of those mistakes, which is unreasonable in local competitions and makes it harder and harder to recruit the referees that every sport needs to let the kids (and amateur adults) play.
