It optimized for maximum vaccine efficacy at around the 5 week timepoint.
Canada took a slightly longer dosing schedule to get more people their first doses faster due to having less available doses. But they didn't go with a 6 month interval either, and there's a difficult calculus there where it isn't at all obvious that one choice is "stupid".
With Delta slamming into India and a lot of doses available in the USA the short schedule got the bulk of the population as immunized as possible.
There's a whole lot of hindsight bias going in trying to claim that was just dumb or unscientific. It probably did save some lives in the summer of 2021 because we did have the doses in this country. Someone who got vaccinated in early April would have only been getting boosted then in early Oct 2021 and that would have been after 75% of the Delta wave had already passed. Second doses clearly needed to be going into arms sooner than 6 months and you can only figure out what timing might have been in optimal in retrospect when you know what the virus was going to do.
It is correct that it didn't allow time for the immune response to mature before the boost and that is the rationale for the third shot. And for anyone getting vaccinated now, particularly young people a 6 month schedule of 2 doses may make more sense (although you always have to look at that 6 month interval and do the calculation on what the risk is of getting COVID during that interval -- at this point though presumably a person who isn't vaccinated isn't very concerned about that and probably has already been exposed at some point).