I never understood the freedom of incorporation issue here in the first place. Perhaps its some concept of "state independence" joined to "competition is good" but at one remove, differential standards in registration & incorporation feels like a bad thing, within an otherwise jurisdictionally consistent model.
TL;DR this shouldn't be effective, if the regulatory landscape is flat. If it's not flat, then states differences are very possibly a bug, not a feature.
It’s not flat, never has been, and you can measure by how many different legal jurisdictions (which cannot be measured by national borders alone) there are in the world how likely it is it ever will be.
Let me put it this way:
I don’t want Mississippi voters determining the laws of my State and Mississippi doesn’t want California voters determining the laws of Mississippi. When we do need to reach some kind of compromise, that’s what Congress is for, and you can measure what there’s room to compromise on by how much Congress gets done in a given session. That’s why we’re different. That’s sometimes inconvenient, but for most people most of the time those inconveniences never come up for them personally.
Contextually jurisdictional flatness meant USA. It's surprising to people in other federated states that these levels of business incorporating processes vary inside the sane polity.
Reductionist "but the world is not flat" ignores how strange America is, French law Louisiana and all. Admittedly scots law is very different. I realise some other places have this but you don't hear of people moving a plc from London to Glasgow because of it.
Yeah, we’re a bunch of weirdos, but weird is not bad. There are good historical reasons for how we are, and not only has there not been a reason to proactively modify the status quo, even if we did, I suspect we would land on a similar arrangement as the present one, or choose to make no changes at all (which would then be called Congress being gridlocked, ineffective and inept by the hypothetical champions of any such reform).
I don't think you can judge by number of state jurisdictions at least, with regard to dealings if not incorporation itself, as almost all adopted the uniform commercial code.
If it comes up in court you never want to rely specifically on knowledge of the UCC at trial without studying up on the particulars of how it has been modified or amended in a particular jurisdiction. That’s a good way to lose a case or at least make your life more difficult than it needs to be.
So despite the name, it’s not exactly uniform even where adopted. But yes, the actual processes tend to be very similar; you still need to do your due diligence on a per State basis where you intend to operate. Besides that, there may be other relevant laws governing your business that are outside the scope of the UCC.
Not sure what you mean by "otherwise jurisdictional consistent" but there needs to be some body of law which is used to judge disputes relating to the governance of the corporation. In the US this is the state law of the state in which the corporation was incorporated. I'm not sure why this would ever be a bad thing, could you give an example of the kind of failure you are alluding to?
You're saying that people never move incorporation or pick incorporation states for tax minimisation, or to avoid penalties or state labour laws, or debt or lawsuit related reasons?
TL;DR this shouldn't be effective, if the regulatory landscape is flat. If it's not flat, then states differences are very possibly a bug, not a feature.