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No offense, but I worked on the Hill as a Staffer and activiely worked on helping draft legislation. Having a front-end developer with no legislative experience trying to explain my former job to me and how we actively wrote legislation is a bit jarring.

Also, I never said it didn't exist - I said it's more common at the state level than the federal level

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"I worked as an individual staffer in 1/538 offices" isn't a great refutation for reputable news reporting; I certainly wouldn't be surprised by lobbyists targeting specific receptive legislators for the tactic. We've got plenty of incontrovertible evidence of lobbyists getting their precise language into bills; a staffer is quoted in the NPR article with a very different opinion than the one you're espousing.

(I'm not a front-end dev, incidentally. That's my absolute least favorite part of the web.)

I know Lee. I also have close friends and ex-colleagues of mine who work at the New America Foundation. Ironically, they also lobby and help write legislation (by your definition).

For example, a lot of the current anti-trust bills coming in the House and separately being spearheaded by Lina Khan in the FTC are directly out of the work the New America Foundation did (I 100% support their cause btw - this statement isn't trying to tar and smear them).

There is stuff to complain about how lobbying is managed in the US, but the take in this entire thread is off and arguing something entirely tangential.