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But if you accept it, you also have to accept what comes with it, which is to-the-letter enforcement
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I would say, NO, we don't have to accept that. For the first few decades after the passage of the NFA, minor paperwork violations didn't automatically send owners to jail. Unregistered guns, when discovered, could be registered, and the taxes paid. Federal agents generally did not go out of their way to persecute the legal owners, and malfunctioning weapons were clearly not considered intentional machine guns.
That started changing back in the 1960s and has continued ever since. Legal machine gun owners who have a mistake in their paperwork are faced with swat team tactics. Over what should be, at worst, a $200 tax matter. The ATF registry of FA firearms was for many years one of the worst kept of federal records. Many instances of the feds losing their copies of registration have occurred. In the old days, when this happened, the owner simply showed the feds his copy, and problem solved. Today, the owner is likely to be charged with a crime, anyway. The enthusiastic enforcement and tactics in use today are not something mandated by the law. They are the result of the people in the administration, those setting policy, and their desire to look good to their bosses, and justify expanding their kingdom and budgets.
The 1986 freeze not only prohibits new made machine guns from being added to the civilian registry, it prevents ALL additions to the registry. So, if you find that grandpa or great grandpa had an unregistered Tommygun, or BAR stuffed in a trunk in the attic for the last 50 years, you CANNOT legally own that gun, no matter what. You cannot register it with the Govt and pay the tax, the govt will not (by law) let you. You cannot keep it, and keep your mouth shut about it, that is a crime. You can't even legally have it deactivated and keep it, as the feds rules only allow that under certain conditions. You MUST turn it in to the feds, and pray that some overzealous type doesn't try to prosecute you. The usually don't in a situation like that, but stranger things have happened.
The website link provided by Re4mer has some interesting info, but there are important things missing as well. In particular, the words "at the rate of" in this sentence.
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A machine gun can normally fire between 400 and 1,000 rounds (bullets) per minute, or between 7 and 17 rounds per second
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only a belt fed medium or heavy machine gun is capable of actually firing over400 rounds in a minute (and only if you have that much ammo linked together). No matter how high the cyclic rate, submachine guns and assault rifles (the real ones, the select fire ones) cannot do this. The need to change magazines, and the skill of the shooter doing so (meaning the amount of time it takes to change the mag) means that they cannot actually fire as many rounds as their cyclic rate numbers imply.
The numbers of actual illegal machine guns used in crimes, or seized during crimes (without actually being fired) has been repeatedly shown to be significantly less than 1% of crime guns, even when using the broadest definitions.
Contrast this with decades of Hollywood "entertainment/propaganda/training films" showing illegal machine guns being used well over 50% (and often much higher percentage) of the time, in crimes.
Machine guns are impressive, they are dramatic, they look good on the big screen, but they are not magic death rays that will wipe out entire city blocks just by pointing and pulling a trigger.