Even though software has been around for a while now, it does still seem to be evolving rapidly enough that a fixed code is a bad idea. Remember password change requirements that were terrible, but stuck around for 20 years before being removed from the relevant voluntary code (I think something from NIST)?

You're describing a compliance success story.

NIST creates the standards that businesses must follow when doing business with the Federal Government. Without those standards, the government's operations would be even more unreliable and haphazard than they are today.

A long time ago they mandated a single password policy, because having thousands of agencies all with different password policies was crazy. At the time, they (and the industry) thought it was a good policy. Some people suspected otherwise, but there was no proof to show that a change was necessary. So academic research was undertaken to find whether the policy was helping. The research showed that it was more harmful than helpful.

Academia proposed a solution, NIST considered it, and then adopted it, in 2017. The language they used in 2017 was "flexible", so nobody really had to change. Finally in 2025 they made the language mandatory. Now the affected companies will be forced to abandon their crappy password policies, specifically because they aren't allowed to keep them anymore, if they want those lucrative contracts.

This should not just apply to the Federal Government. The same reasons FedGov needs these standards applies to every single one of us. The tech lobby has successfully fought this for years, and politicians are scared of introducing something that might negatively impact public citizens (and thus risk the politician's job). But they can't deny that FedGov needs these standards.

This is a pretty normal process. The electrical code, building code, fire code, etc, all take time to change. But the changes do happen, and we all reap the benefits. With no code at all, we would be experiencing a lot more death, injury, financial loss, and inconvenience.

And btw, there is a lot of technology that has not evolved much in 40 years. We don't need to make everything absolutely perfect, and every aspect 100% set in stone, in order to have a code. Every other code is updated regularly. Software code can change too. (Or are software people too incompetent to figure it out? I might agree with that...)