It is vindictive. When non-vindictive measures failure, the measure of last resort sadly tends to be the vindictive one. I don't know if this was part of your point (I imagine it was), but the vengeful carcerality of vindictive justice is independent from meaningful structural change that would prevent bad actors from repeating similar actions in the future. Everyone performs their role feigning outrage, repentance, regret and reconciliation, until the same thing happens all over again.

I would be surprised if that did not happen here. The collusion between credit bureaus, banks and lenders is well known for its issues to consumers, but without consequences for adverse consequences to them, business will continue as usual. Will it be savvy fraudsters who place backpressure on the crumbling ability of credit bureaus to prescreen for credit-worthiness? Will upstart incumbents see high margin, low fitness targets ripe for disruption? Will corporate raiders see ossifying remains just ripe enough to be scavenged? Even if all answers to these questions were in the affirmative, I don't know if any of that would lead to immediate change. But, I'd be surprised if business continued as usual forever. The bar for a step function level improvement is quite low, if you could somehow retrofit a better way to pull credit into legacy underwriting processes.

Source: Early stage engineer and prior executive at $PREVIOUS_FIRMS that included two growth stage consumer lending startups.