The point is that it was constructed largely as a convenient a fiction intended to mollify the Swiss electorate after they voted no to the EEA, as the bulk of the "separate" bilateral treaties can't be separated, altered or cancelled without all of them being canceled by the guillotine clause, as Switzerland has already found out once, so there is no difference in the difficulty of cancellations, for example - you cancel one thing, and everything unravels in either case.
They are actively being negotiated because both Switzerland and the EU have realised there's a need to reform the original treaties, and the EU for a decade now have insisted that anything replacing them need to be closer to the EEA agreement, while having made clear they're not doing this crazy thing again for anyone else.
