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Notes -
To extend the previous response a bit more, consider that the methods they use might be genuinely adaptive.
As you say, Bell doesn't try to optimize the violence. What would happen if he did? Suppose he decides he needs that one territory real bad, so he puts together a serious hit squad, trains them up in weapons and tactics, arms them with actual carbines, not glocks and shotguns...
...And then one of these guys gets nabbed for incidental stupidity, blabs to the cops, and the organization and infrastructure vastly increases Bell's exposure, so he goes immediately to jail for life.
...It works, and they go through a couple corners like the Reaper's scythe. The extremely unusual level of lethality, the weapons used, and the unusual tactics employed draw immediate and overwhelming attention from the cops, and massive police resources are diverted to tracking down the squad and the man behind them specifically. Go to the previous step.
...It works, and the cops for some reason ignore it. The dumb gangs are wiped out, the smarter gangs observe and copy, violence as a whole increases dramatically, the police come down hard on everyone. Bell likely is either killed by someone else being smart, or is sent to jail for life.
Gang war looks sorta like real war, if you hold your head at an angle and squint. It's easy to think that they're trying to do real war and they're just super bad at it. But in fact, they aren't trying to do real war, they're trying to do a peculiar kind of business where, in the words of P.J. O'Rourke, the only way to enforce a contract is with a contract, and plenty of enforcers. The shootings are an obvious net-negative, a necessary evil that it's in everyone's interest to minimize and avoid. And later in the show, when you get an actual, smart, ambitious, ruthless and efficient kingpin, he doesn't go for infantry tactics, he goes for discrete murders and meticulously hidden bodies, because the problem isn't killing the other guys, it's getting away with it.
A way to look at it would be that the last comment is why greater lethality doesn't arrive from the bottom-up, and this one is why it doesn't arrive from the top-down.
We also had this with Stringer who ran the business another way, but the return of his boss really hamstrung him.
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