Unrelated to the overall point you're trying to make, but shorts didn't cause the '08 recession. They just profited from it. The cause was banks treating mortgage backed securities as if they were an unsinkable asset class.

Relating things back to your point though, I'm not convinced that blockchains solve this. Take the crypto crash of spring/summer '22: You have a few products (TerraUSD/Luna, CEL token) "generating" yield that everyone (DEFI, CEFI, retail, institutions) piles on top of. Then that base layer of "value" turns out to be a naked emperor and there's a massive crash when everything based on that system is now backed by nothing. Rigid computerized rules are only as solid as the axioms that underpin them. You can decentralize the interpretation of rules, but somebody can always start with a flawed assumption and then it doesn't matter how reliable your decentralized system is.

As long as any asset can be rehypothecated into another, shinier asset, there's always a risk that the underlying asset is shit. It's no less true in crypto as in conventional banking.