But that's not what the English ear hears... and on the other hand, in Chinese Tofu is the reference whereas in English Cheese is the reference object.
Moreover, Chinese word creation clobs disconnected words together to make new words. Fire + chicken = Turkey, Fire + Car = Locomotive/Train, Fly + Machine = Aircraft, etc. So this is not out of the ordinary for Chinese word creation.
Curd doesn't traditionally exist in (Han) China, as with most other dairy. There's a word for it now (凝乳) but it's not in any relation to tofu.
The "fu" in doufu taken by itself does indeed mean rotten. But characters on their own can have very different meanings compared to when used in combination in words. There isn't necessarily a connection, just like in English the word "rotten" doesn't have anything to do with the number 10 that's contained in it.
Tofu isn't fermented but made by boiling soy milk and adding a coagulating agent. I was curious and looked it up and that process was described the same way already in Ming Dynasty, so the "rotten" character might just be random and not have any such meaning. It's very common in Chinese that new concepts are expressed with existing characters, because you can't go around making up a new character for everything, no one could ever remember that many characters (bad enough as it is). Often it's just about the sound. For example the characters in the word for cheese (起司) mean "rise" and "manage" when taken on their own. It would be gibberish to read it that way, but every Chinese person knows combined they mean cheese.
Cheese is being referenced because it's a natural extension of "You can't call it X if it's not the way we used to do X". If Texas wants to limit the definition of meat, then logically they should be limiting the definition of cheese, milk, and even salt, for that matter.
Without that, it looks less like a matter of evenhanded regulatory enforcement or consumer protection, and more like a legislature beholden to a corporation.
