It’s different, unfortunately. I wish you were right. The problem is that creating interesting and fun CTF challenges is a very active, time consuming, creativity-heavy task. A chess board is always the same, and always will be, but every CTF competition is unique. There is little to no incentive anymore to spend time creating the challenges. You might say “well create the challenges and share them with people who care and who want to play honestly” which is probably the right answer here, and might happen at a smaller scale. I picture CTF in the future almost like a tabletop RPG experience, one where a small amount of people will share with close friends who they trust. But the usual “open” CTF scene (as mentioned by op) is probably over for good, if we’re being honest.

Yea, but chess adapted to it and is restricting use of engines. When you play a tournament you are banned from using a phone and will be disqualified if you do so. Online tournaments don't have a prize money for that reason, so there is no real benefit for cheating. Lichess and chess.com additionally add rankings for bots and have a strict anticheat if you use bots for regular games.

For me it feels like this is not really possible for live CTFs. In contrast to chess you can't ban AI, as live CTFs are about breaking things by design, so they'll always try to circumvent an AI ban.

> I don’t know like chess engines didn’t kill chess. You could just play with people that don’t use the “engine”

Impossible to do online, at least. People go beyond things for virtual fame and "owning" others. Even if it is based on cheating.