What I don't get is that they wanted to have the most public system of any social media company. The proposal included an independent audit board, compromised of industry and government officials that could audit the code at any given time and would be forced to do periodic audits. AFAIK bytedance was completely on board with the proposal, but then it just gets scrapped and then they say the only thing they want is a ban and resale.

So it's clearly not about the CCP changing algorithms to promote progaganda... it's about the US governments current inability to change the algorithms to promote their propaganda. Otherwise having everything out in the daylight would solve the whole CCP problem, it just wasn't the problem.