The situation is perfectly relevant, just its scale is larger than other incidences. The U.S. makes visa holders return to their own country to renew the stamp

The situation is perfectly relevant, just its scale is larger than other incidences. The U.S. makes visa holders return to their own country to renew the stamp because in the case of denial, the U.S. can just wash their hands of the visa holder. Also, I think you’re continuing to conflate the actual H-1B visa with the stamp. You can’t get a stamp unless you have a valid visa. My wife’s H-1B was still valid and active at the time, only her stamp had expired. There are also discrepancies between how long the stamps last. Chinese stamps only last a year, whereas others countries’ last longer. You are also incorrect about her traveling back in this instance. If her passport wasn’t held hostage by the U.S. Consulate awaiting a new stamp, she could have traveled back to the U.S. prior to the ban took effect. Even if she missed that, the U.S. Consulate held her, foreign issued mind you, passport, preventing travel to Canada on a valid visa. The entire point is that this entire stamp process has these secondary and tertiary effects, seemingly by design, that are disconnected from the actual visas and act as an additional layer of complexity and increases the surface area for arbitrary denial separate form the actual visa process. The visa and the stamp are two different things.