Indeed, I’m not sure what compels people to compare real regulatory systems from now or history to some imaginary free market where producers always act in their long-term interest and consumers always have perfect information.

Every functioning society on earth regulates food drugs and infrastructure. We lived through the unregulated version for centuries, and it took mountains of dead children and poisoned workers to win the rules we have now; tearing them down just means ordinary people will pay the price all over again.

Capture is a failure mode of every institution humans have ever built, including the courts we presumably still want. The answer is to design better institutions, not to get rid of them and hope things work out.