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Hey no need to snark. Thank you for the correction. Yes, it's possible that many (what percentage?) of bureaucrats will not receive checks temporarily. My guess is that the details are complicated.
But the page count does matter. Reductio ad absurdum, would you be okay with a 1 million page continuing resolution? We need our congresspeople to actual read and be informed about the laws they vote on. Frankly, it's hard to believe that anyone would take the opposite position.
They're not that complicated.
With a few exceptions, all federal employees are furloughed during a shutdown. (This includes everyone from "bureaucrats" to the janitors cleaning the buildings - assuming the latter are actually federal civilians and not contractors, which many of them are.) This is not just all the people you think of as "bureaucrats" in HHS and the VA and SSA and EPA and NEA and national parks, etc., but folks working for the DoD, for the IC, the FBI, and the GS-4 park rangers and motor pool guys and badge issuers and so on.
The exceptions are people who are considered "essential." This does not, contrary to what some folks have suggested, mean that everyone else could easily be fired and the government would carry on just fine. You can suspend the operations of a bunch of agencies for a while and most people would not notice immediately, it doesn't mean that work isn't piling up and the effects won't be felt eventually. But essential personnel have to keep working to make sure everything doesn't literally grind to a halt.
This is one reason why a lot of people think these furloughs are "no big deal," because the stuff that people would really notice - airports being shut down, social security checks not being mailed out, military standing down, etc. - doesn't happen thanks to the skeleton crew of "essential personnel" who continue to work.
Everyone else goes home and all work stops.
In the past, in theory, furloughed federal employees had no guarantee of being paid for their forced time off, though in practice, Congress always voted to restore their back pay. After playing chicken over CRs became an annual thing, Congress passed the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act in 2019, which guarantees back pay after a furlough. So yes, feds are essentially being given a free paid vacation during a furlough. (Though they still aren't getting paid during it, which can cause financial hardships for some if the furlough goes on for a long time.)
If you think this is unfair, that feds are getting a "free vacation," well, it is, but that's entirely on Congress's shoulders. And if you said "Sorry, furloughs mean you just don't get paid, now come back to work when Congress says so, and by the way, this is likely to happen on a regular basis," consider who will stick around to work for the government under those conditions and who won't. If you're one of those "abolish the federal government, all government employees are parasites" types, this may sound good, but most people I think would not like the long-term effects.
Keep in mind that a lot of people working for the government now are actually contractors working for private companies, but doing "government business." (This is an entirely different boondoggle on a huge scale.) They are not allowed to work in government buildings during a government shutdown, and they don't get back pay restored by Congress. Some of them will be temporarily sent home by their companies unpaid; others will be given work to do by the company during the furlough. This is entirely up to each company.
Overall, furloughs are a big expensive mess that shouldn't happen if not for Congressional dysfunction.
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