As far as I can tell, what happened is this law was passed in the heat of the moment (Gaza war), but it turned out to be massively unpopular and ineffective at

As far as I can tell, what happened is this law was passed in the heat of the moment (Gaza war), but it turned out to be massively unpopular and ineffective at shoring up US support for the outgoing administration's foreign policy, and even after its moment had passed the combination of the arguments raised by the lawyers for ByteDance and the phrasing of the very unique, very specific bill got it through the Supreme Court, so now everyone's been stuck with trying to figure out how to get rid of it.