> I wonder if it’s worth governments’ time trying to come up with automatically expiring bills for “emergency” uses such as these.

The Patriot Act has a sunset clause, but has been repeatedly extended, which no obvious sign of it ever not being extended.

The ability to change laws makes it easier for government's to sell these sorts of changes to their constituents ("it's only temporary") whilst knowing that it probably won't turn out to actually be temporary, because they can change something that is temporary into effectively permanent.