The old version stayed around but (essentially) nobody wanted to use it. If they had, the forked version would be worthless. That is the difference. A cryptocurrency fork cannot succeed without the consent of the community. No one is compelled to use it the way that you are compelled to accept the decisions of a regulator.

when the core devs lose money, the rules change.

There are a great many of them, you just can't see them in the dark forest. https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest

Check the prizes for the bug bounties in big smart contracts. The prizes are truly crazy, like Uniswap pays $15,000,000 for a critical vuln, and $1,000,000 for a high vuln. With that kind of money, I HIGHLY doubt there aren't people grinding against smart contracts as you say.

Of course they are, and they've been doing it since long before ChatGPT or any of that was a thing. Before it was more with classifiers and concolic execution engines, but it's only gotten way more advanced.

As soon as money in larger sums gets involved, the legal system will crack down hard on you if you are anywhere in the Western sphere of influence, easy as that.

In contrast, countries like North Korea, Russia, Iran - they all make bank on cryptocurrency shenanigans because they do not have to fear any repercussions.

I mean they are, the only news here is that Anthropic isn't staffed by ignorant know-it-alls that wholesale dismiss the web3 development space like some other forum I know of

Contracts themselves can hold funds. Usually a contract hack extracts the money it holds.

$3500 was the average cost per exploit they found. The cost to scan a contract averaged to $1.22. That cost should be paid by each contract's developers. Often they pay much more than that for security audits.