The Section 174 changes altered the accounting method that software development companies must use for calculating their profit for tax purposes. Starting in 2022 software dev must be treated not as an expense but as an investment in an asset, such that you're now required to amortize the expense over 5 years instead of deducting it from your revenue the year you spent the money.
The gigantic problem with this change is that without the ability to expense software development expenses as expenses, a new software startup can very easily be considered profitable in their first year because only 10% of their software development-related expenses get to be counted as expenses.
And note that, contrary to what you say, most white-collar work is not treated this way, and software is further singled out from other R&D-type work in that it is the only type of work that is explicitly called out in the section as being required to be marked as R&D. So we're not asking for software to be treated specially, we're asking why it suddenly changed in 2022 to be treated specially in an extremely negative way.