But I'm also not sure what the benefit of enrolling in their ID protection scheme is, given that the whole reason they're offering it is because they already gave it out to some rando on the internet.
It's rather like paying the schoolyard bully to stop taking your lunch money.
This meme is part of the problem. The lawyers take maybe a third of the settlement, after bearing most of the costs of litigation themselves, which they would still bear if they lost. It's high risk/high reward. Lowering the reward just means no lawyer will take the case.
There is a real issue where the incentives for the lawyers don't line up well with the interests of the class. The lawyers likely do pretty well if they settle a huge case for tens of millions and the main thing that happens for the class is they can't file a lawsuit anymore.
The financial penalty for the company is better than nothing, but it often isn't all that much and often doesn't do the class any real good either.
In practice it seems it basically just winds up being a big payout for whoever actually filed.
I'm not entirely certain that a class action settlement is a sufficient deterrent; do the payouts typically hurt the company enough to not take some given risk again?