It was recognized by law makers that drones could be used for nefarious purposes and needed some form of regulation.

I'm not saying that drone registration thwarts illegal use, but at least something was done by regulators.

Drone regulation has done precisely nothing to thwart illegal use, while imposing substantial cost and inconvenience on legitimate actors. The laws don't stop me from buying a heavy-lift drone from China, nor do they stop me from doing something nefarious with it. At best, the regulations have slightly reduced the risk of inadvertent airprox incidents, but they have been utterly useless in addressing the sorts of risks they were supposed to combat.

That's an example of the politician's fallacy. Doing something can be much worse than doing nothing. Did drone registration actually improve anything?

Either way these regulations don't help much when people just don't care, as can be seen with all the drones flying too close to airports.

When the recreational/commercial models got range and mass enough to get in the way of aircraft, that's when the first round of "whoa!" kicked in.

Still going to take more work to figure out reasonable controls.