SARS is both much more deadly than COVID-19 and less infectious (in particular, people didn't seem to spread it prior to developing symptoms). Both of those things make contact tracing far more viable - the high hospitalization and death rate means that outbreaks could be detected really promptly and reliably because people turned up in hospitals with symptoms, and the fact it spread less effectively made it easy to track down the other people in the outbreak and quarantine them. On the other hand, COVID-19 is similar enough to the flu that contact tracing it should be even more futile than trying to contain the flu via contact tracing.

Also, if the things that worked successfully to stop SARS from doing what COVID-19 has done worked for it as well, then it would have been stopped just like SARS. All the western countries like the US, UK, Italy (I think), etc did SARS-style contact tracing starting really early on. It just didn't work this time around. There's not a huge amount of media coverage of this because it doesn't fit the narrative, but you should be able to find some.

They are still doing contact tracing, and even doubling down on it

to be fair, if nothing had been done, it is pretty likely that the surge of deaths would have trashed the economy just as well.

Not that I disagree that the US response has been among the worst .. and the bar is pretty low with only a handful of countries (like south korea and Taiwan) having been able to promptly adopt effective strategies.