So the cftc is a tiny agency (~700 total employees) and has a lot of other things they regulate (everything from commodities exchange order book micro manipulation to gold fraud over the phone).
At the end of the day FTX came apart too fast and didn’t impact enough people to generate a reason for them to spend their limited resources on them.
This is not accurate. FTX is, afaik, the biggest fraud of it's kind that there has ever been. I saw today an estimate in the FT of 1m creditors. Biggest outright fraud since Madoff, in many ways this is even bigger (Madoff didn't steal directly from his investors, he just paid off old investors/himself with new investors, Madoff was a $60bn fraud but most of this money never existed at all, Madoff was maybe $20bn and a good portion of this has been recovered...SBF did actually steal $10bn...it seems).
Generally, the issue is that regulators come down like a ton of bricks on the little guy but won't do anything when something is too big to regulate.
There is no easy solution to this because you will never be able to overcome the lack of critical thought at regulatory agencies. It is also worth considering the actual scope of protection that regulators offer: the premise of most regulation is that regulators can regulate...when they can't (this is less true outside financial regulation btw, in financial markets you seem the same people do the same scam over and over with no consequences because there are slight variations...and then come down heavily on other people who are innovating...it is really despairing).
At the end of the day FTX came apart too fast and didn’t impact enough people to generate a reason for them to spend their limited resources on them.