The SEC is not focused on making the "institutional investors" whole. That is happening in bankruptcy court, because Celsius declared bankruptcy, and that is how bankruptcies work: the senior creditors get their money back first. If you have problems with that, take it up with the bankruptcy court and U.S. bankruptcy laws that classify customers as junior creditors.

In fact, the SEC does not ever get involved in "making investors whole." It leaves that part up to the investors themselves.

The SEC's complaint seeks to bar Mashinsky from future involvement in crypto trading, to bar him from being an officer or director of a publicly traded company, and for the disgorgement of profits arising from maintaining the price of crypto tokens through market manipulation tactics. [https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-133]

Also, in your Pokemon example you claim that buying up Pokemon that completes your collection somehow constitutes market manipulation. But that's a thing collectors actually do...so...by definition not market manipulation but a fundamental part of the market for collectibles (and in the Pokemon hypo Pokemons have instrinsic value because they can be used and valued in a Pokemon game independently of their trading value, in addition to their trading fair market value based on their rarity as a collectible item). This is very different from what the Celsisus guy did; he used wash trading to artificially increase the price of a crypto token whose only value was in being traded.