I think rules can elide, and often do. But human behavior elides just as much. In a freeform roleplay, I don't think most people would describe how they pick a lock in minute detail, they would just say something to the effect of "my guy picks the lock." And maybe this is fine, or maybe eventually people realize "hey, if we're all just able to pick any lock by saying so, locks don't mean anything." So they start introducing a rule: you can't just pick locks, you have to do [x].
[x] could be many things. It could be flipping a coin, it could be going back and forth with a referee about the behavior of each individual pin. Both are rules, as far as I'm concerned, and neither of them elides. One has a lot less going on relative to the other, but both are augmenting the baseline experience of "my character does whatever I say my character does."
Here's a rule: "No Godmodding." This is a bit of internet lingo I saw a lot in my forum RP days. What it means is this: you can say what your character does, but you don't get to decide for other people how it affects their characters. So instead of saying "I cut your head clean off with my katana, the end," you would say "I swing my katana at your neck, aiming to cut your head off," and the other person would get an opportunity to describe their own character dodging, or catching the blade between their palms, or maybe even getting hit. This is a rule which, in effect, does the opposite of eliding combat. In spaces where it isn't listed as an explicit rule, many still follow it as a piece of etiquette, sometimes even unconsciously, having never heard of it before. But roleplaying with someone who doesn't follow it makes it extremely apparent, at least to me, just how much the rule allows for richer and more fleshed-out combat. (It applies to things other than combat, too, but combat seems to be one of the realms where people are most inclined to break it.)
"No Godmodding" combined with "one player gets referee duties and also the entire world as their character" leads to a pretty classic TTRPG-style GM-and-player experience, and once you reach that point I think additional rules often elide from that experience. But it's important (at least to me, maybe nobody else cares) to remember the huge groundwork of often-unspoken rules which allow that experience to exist at all.
Strictly speaking, I do think every rule either limits what fiction a player is allowed to tell ("you can't roleplay other people's characters") or compels a player to tell a fiction they might not otherwise tell ("when this number reaches zero, you must roleplay your character dying"). And the second is kind of just an extreme version of the first ("when this number reaches zero, you can't roleplay anything except your character dying"). But having these rules in place affects people's behavior in ways beyond those explicitly denoted within the text of the rules, and as such I think rules usually have as much of an additive effect on the fiction as they have a subtractive one.