I think most of these engineers are interested in the high compensation that the blockchain space has been able to offer so far. If high compensations disappear, I suspect engineers will switch too.
Bad actors will keep on existing as long as crypto is useful, which it will remain for the foreseeable future, specially considering the ever more restrictive personal banking regulations.
If you flush these particular bad actors, others will simply take their place
Once you take the utility of a product away it becomes worthless.
First because it seems that everything needs to be flushed out. FTX was highly regarded. Binance is the largest exchange. What shouldn’t be flushed by that logic? Bitcoin? Maybe Ethereum?
It also makes a weirdly naive distinction, between the « good actors », people who are selflessly coding and building things for the good of humanity (and who also don’t exist), and the « bad actors », who are there for hidden motives.
Why is crypto the only place where people make this distinction? We don’t make it for banks, or coffee shops, or car makers, with fantasmatic and ephemeral « good actors» (where nobody agrees on which they are) and bad self-interested bad actors.
And secondly because it doesn’t work like that. Bad things don’t get flushed until the good remains. Newer bad things come and replace them, on and on, until things get regulated.