Sounds cooler than it is

Tbf as a Swede I just log in, glance at the forms, sign and log out. That's what easy is.

if they can handle about an hour of basic paperwork,

People make it out like tax filing is like travelling to Ry'leh and transcribing eldritch runes, but it's made pretty dead simple. Put the number from one box in piece of paper A into the corresponding box in piece of paper B. If it has you do a math, you can just... Do a math. Pull out your calculator and subtract the amount you've paid so far from the amount you owe. Is the result a negative number? Congratulations! You're getting a return! Is the number positive? Oh no! That's how much you need to pay the IRS!

I get that for some people it is significantly more complicated than that, but if you work one job where you make some number of dollars per hour and you don't invest in the stock market or cryptocurrency, it's virtually idiotproof.

My country just tells you.

Yeah. Basically, we get a pre-filled form with most of what can automatically filled in, already filled in. Of course some stuff like donations (which are deductible) and other stuff that are not automatically linked to you have to be added by hand, but for a vast majority of people there is no such thing.

So basically, open the pre-filled form, check that the incomes and your current situation is correct, send it back, then you basically get the amount (which can be either automatically collected through direct debit at a given date, split monthly, or paid manually).

We usually argue about why and how much tax we pay, but I never had any heated discussion about the tax system itself.