I agree, this is also a perfectly valid read. Unfortunately Star Trek spends a lot of time with Starfleet and The Federation and almost not at all with Earth to understand the nuances of governance of productivity. But they are still supposed to be several billions of people, it’s hard to imagine there’s only ad-hoc organization going on to keep something as massive as Starfleet and The Federation going. Even the Vulcans had the High Command. Earth must have something akin to a government structure going on to produce a representative diplomatic corpus. The Federation is supposed to be a Republic after all, and that’s not anarchy. Perhaps a system of direct democratic municipalism, but we don’t know for sure.