If I understand correctly, the World Cup competition is based not only on winning games in the brackets, but also by a count of the total goals scored:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIFA_Women’s_World_Cup#Final_tournament
That means the American women should absolutely have been scoring as many goals as possible in this, as in all their other games in the tournament.
The 2016 U.S. Mens Rugby team got bounced out from advancing to the top-8 medal round because despite beating host Brazil 26-0, they fell one point short in differential, in losing to the dominant, undefeated, eventual gold medalist Fiji, by a try.
Had they beaten Brazil 28-0 instead of 26-0, they’d have been in the medal round.