That level of "argument" from a federal judge should be grounds for instant removal. It's bafflingly stupid, and nakedly partisan and outcome-motivated. Some ideas are just categorically bad, and the regulator needs to be able to say that, rather than pretend that the answer is always "halfway in between".
For his next decision, will he forbid the SEC from regulating all insider trading, since they didn't find a way to target "specific, harmful" patterns? And yet somehow I suspect he wouldn't bat an eye if the FDA were to decide that all abortifacients were disallowed, instead of looking at each one individually...
And of course, all of that is ignoring that he's flagrantly lying about the facts of the case, in at least two ways:
1. The summary is misstated. The FTC did not find that all non-competes were invalid. It specifically carved out cases where the balance leans toward non-regulation - namely, non-competes for executives.
2. Some of the "arbitrary and capricious" reasoning claims that no states have passed non-compete bans as broad as what the FTC did, and therefore none of their quantitative evidence can matter. That is, again, blindingly stupid on the face of it - but it's also factually false, because California has had just as broad a ban on non-competes for many decades.