But that means that a tenured professor will start acting in non-academically-independent ways at some point before their tenure is up to avoid messing up their re-applicaction.

It is also quite likely that events such as departmental re-orgs could be timed around tenure expiration to eliminate specific job descriptions in order to make re-applying more difficult.

You might be able to achieve the same goals though some combination of making tenure transferrable between cooperating institutions, mandatory sabbaticals, requiring review committees be partly or wholely staffed from outside the institution, etc.