Devils advocate ish reason:

People understand what a plank of wood is and how it works.

People, including the vast majority of politicians, don’t understand our technology at all. It’s magic. Why does a light come on when they flip the switch? Magic. Computers are deep black magic.

How can they write effective regulation? Or tell the difference between proposals that are good or bad written by others?

If politicians regulated big tech more we’d probably end up with a ton of regulatory capture that legislated monopolies for big tech and shut out open source and startups, because who has the money to influence the ignorant lawmakers at scale?

We are now in a world where small groups of high priests understand certain things, and few others. We’ve been there for a while but it’s gotten far more opaque in the last 25 years or so.

Even something like a nuclear reactor or an aircraft is much easier to explain. The last episode of the Chernobyl series did a great job explaining what was wrong with that reactor design to a layperson. But computing… and networks… people who do understand it have forgotten just how ludicrously arcane and inscrutable it is to most.

A big difference too is that by the Church-Turing theorem there is (as a side effect of it) a provably infinite number of ways to perform any computation. Which means you can’t just legislate “don’t do that.” Physical machines are not like that.

The point of having advisors was supposed to be that they would help the elected person make up for lack of knowledge, but it doesn't seem like that pans out in reality. Either the advisors are just as lost, or they are largely ignored.