It's not actually a bad strategy, ultimately the law is probably going to get slapped down as unworkable and there's pretty good evidence to suggest that they knew it wouldn't work even before they implemented it, which won't make them look good.

Unfortunately the courts move so slowly that none of this has happened yet and the law has now gone into effect because the timer ran out, but in theory they could have done all the work to comply only for the law never to have happened.

The law was announced a long time before it came into effect,

Isn't one of the basic principles of law that laws can not be made retroactive so as to arbitrarily extract punishment? if someone tells me "we'll implement this law in 2026" and they do commit, then I'm unconcerned until 2025-12-31.

Practically they can't. In theory they could complain to the United States that a US business is attempting to circumvent UK law, but I can't imagine that having much effect at the moment.

In theory it all works because companies would be more inclined to pay the fine than to lose UK customers, in reality of course it doesn't work because everybody would just use a VPN anyway, but the people who wrote these laws don't know about VPNs because they think computers run on magic smoke.