It seems like grammar rules just form up on their own and no language is a “mess”, how can it be?
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You’ll note that not all languages follow the same grammar rules. There is no default or base grammar in language.
Over time people come to understandings of effective communication and then standardize through spoken word / print mediums
Humans like patterns. Your brain is always looking to form them. Grammar is just a pattern that words make. Each language has its own pattern, and once the people speaking that language notice a pattern forming, they tend to stick to it.
It’s actually easier if your past tense follows some kind of pattern instead of manifesting differently every time. Easier to know how to express it and interpret it. People coordinate, naturally. Say the easiest thing, interpret it the easiest way.
Languages without any structure are just super hard to learn and it is realy good if you can predict things about a word language without knowning the word exactly. Like knowing if something happend in the past, present or future just from the sentence structure or from the verb without knowing all the words or even just knowing that something is a verb or subject from where in the sentence the word is helps a lot when learning a language.
These benefits are so big that any language that exists for some time will develope some features that make it easier.
What is a “mess” depends on the language.
The phrase “she goes to the park every day at 2pm” in Chinese is 她每天下午两点去公园, which literally translates to “she everyday afternoon 2 hour go park”. It seems like a “mess” to English speakers, but has a standardized structure, and it conveys all the information it needs.
Every sentence needs verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc because that is how communication works, you need to be able to say all of those things to say what you need to.
According to some linguists, such as Noam Chomsky, it’s because humans have innate structures in our brains which make us inclined toward forming grammatical structures. The specific inputs differ, which is why some languages have certain structures and others don’t, but you always get *some* structure even in spontaneous languages that arise without conditioning from a prior language. This is held to be demonstrated by Nicaraguan Sign Language, a new language developed by deaf children in the 1980s and 1990s. The technical term for this claimed innate characteristic of human brains is the “Language Acquisition Device” or LAD.
This theory is controversial and not all linguists agree about it. But it is one common explanation for the pattern that you ask about here.
Because the “rules” are descriptive, not ~~predictive~~ prescriptive. That is the ‘rules’ are describing the patterns we see that evolved naturally not that someone came up with the rules and demanded that everyone follow them.
Language isn’t just about communicating information. It’s also used for communicating group status. As an obvious example, look at teen slang. By having things that “only we say” they have a sense of who “we” are in that. If it becomes necessary for a community to establish they’re “not the people in that next village over” then they’ll start changing their ‘slang’. Slang turns into dialect. Dialect turns into language. And poof, all kinds of grammar differences.
Look into chomsky’s theory of universal grammar. That pretty much explains what you are asking
Grammar rules are language specific, not universal.
And language without grammar rules is incomprehensible, so in order for language to accomplish anything meaningful beyond communication of vague concepts, grammar is absolutely necessary.
“Og and I saw 15 buffalo, two moose, and a rockslide today” communicates a very complex story. Without grammar rules, it becomes meaningless and easy to misunderstand.
“Buffalo saw Og I moose and two rockslide a today and” is the exact same sentence without grammar rules. How could you possibly parse what this person means, even though the words in the sentence are exactly the same?
The answer is you can’t.
So grammar evolved with language because language is next to useless without it.
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