Isnt it way too easy for whales to make a ton of money in this (unregulated) crypto space?

A whale is someone who can move markets. That can be a massive antarctic blue whale like CZ (Binance) or Elon Musk (Tesla/SpaceX/Twitter), who could move bigger projects, or a relatively smaller dwarf sperm whale with enough funds to make smaller projects move up significantly.

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My question: is it not (way too) easy for a whale to make a ton of money in this space?

I imagine this 7-step process for "easily" turning a lot of money into much more money in the crypto space:

1. Whales slowly accumulate a coin, preferably during boring period, such as now
2. Whales are done accumulating
3. Whales open longs
4. Whales pump the price with the remaining funds
5. Retail FOMOs in because of green candles and news posts
6. Whales close longs to take profits and open shorts
7. Whales dump on retail to make more profits on the way back down

After that, the whales have more funds available to do it again at a later stage. This includes many decently successful centralized projects where the VCs/CEO hold(s) a lot of the supply, because in a way they are free to pump and dump their own project and that is relatively easy to do for them.

What is stopping a whale from choosing a small project like LTO (32 million market cap) and just accumulate some, open a long, and pump the price like mad?

In traditional finance, every investment has to be registered and becomes public, making it less likely to pump and dump hard, right? But in crypto land the regulations aren't as strict and a lot happens behind the scenes, which makes it easy for whales to engage in this type of behavior, even with their own project.

Would you agree, or am I missunderstanding things? I also wonder whether it is a key strategy for retail then to identify where this happens and ride the "whale waves"?