There is no paperwork involved in depreciating a piece of furniture over a standard schedule. You seem to be of the belief that you are required to show documentation tracking individual assets. That’s not true any more than proving the payment actually occurre as for expenses.
The de minimus rule is, as your own quote indicates, for a tiny, tiny subset of your assets.
You need to track and document assets in your books to depreciate them, and in the event of an audit you need to substantiate it.
That is paperwork. Unless your tax folks are just yolo’ing amounts into the appropriate fields in your taxes anyway, in which case you’ve got bigger problems.
You are correct that it doesn’t necessarily require going out and tracking say every individual desk.
But to depreciate it, you would need to be able to show you bought x desks for y $$ (and those were reasonable business expenses), including receipts, and if the IRS got worked up, they might demand to see said desks. Which if you had no idea where they were, is going to be hard eh?
And then you need to track them over the period of time you’re depreciating them (and how much was depreciated).
Which for a small business is not worth the hassle at all.
And it is highly unlikely the amount they spent on said desks is not de minimus.
If you are IBM or sprint or whatever? Then sure. That is why they have massive accounting departments, asset tag everything, etc.
Even they don’t bother with hand tools and the like for tax purposes though.
The de minimus rule is, as your own quote indicates, for a tiny, tiny subset of your assets.