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I think internal revolt is something to fear. You can't expect a thing to be done that'll destroy the government that does it and bring into power one that will reverse it. By that standard I could have solved the problems of the Roman Empire in 15 minutes: stop paying the soldiers so much. I'd be dead but hey, I cracked the issue!
Putting that aside, you also have to factor in that they took Israeli hostages. So it wasn't a situation you could walk away from. It was between letting those people languish, going and getting them or another wave of danegeld that led to this problem in the first place. Sinwar should have died in an Israeli jail.
Maybe they should have taken a deal for the hostages sooner and wrote off Gaza (assuming the deal was honored and that Hamas, who you note had an explicit goal to cause enough damage to their own to wreck normalization) but then some damage would already have been done by the necessary war to get to that. Whatever price Hamas asked while it was whole and intact would have been intolerable.
If an enemy has already shown that concessions made lead to worse outcomes, it's difficult to justify making future concessions that are even more ruinous. Your theory of the case was tried. The Palestinians outperformed expectations. Leaving them in the same spot opened the risk of future spikes like that, especially since we didn't know how their allies would react or how competent they'd be.
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