I would say more that this is a case of gaming the metrics - regulation is looser for variations of the same plane (This Is A Good Thing) and so Boeing did shady shit to classify this new plane as a variant. The only way to prevent this is to sufficiently fund the regulators so that a human can do a sanity check and reject the gaming; but decades of defunding of regulatory agencies and the resulting regulatory capture made the FAA incapable of doing that.
