This is always such an amateur take on class actions.
The action in 2018 was about a delay on EAP features, not a complete failure to deliver. The lawsuit was never about a full refund on EAP, or FSD. Which is why payments were tied to when you bought your car, and were not huge.
There were 33,000 class members. Tesla was required to pay $5.4M in damages. So the reason you didn't get much money is because the court itself didn't find massive damages here.
The court assigned $1M of that to the lawyers. That's less than 20%. More importantly, it's $30 per class member. When was the last time you could hire a lawyer for $30? It should be noted that normal lawyer contingency fees are 20%-50%, so this was very cheap.
Would you seriously prefer that nobody had sued Tesla? Would you have sued Tesla yourself? Do you think you could have gotten a full refund for EAP, while paying less than a few thousand in lawyer's fees, which would have been required to net $280 or more?
People always focus on how much the lawyers make, but it's actually the courts that set these fees, and they pay reasonable rates for the hours of work put in. And of course, the lawyers are doing this at risk- if they lose, they don't get paid at all. If you ever wonder why there aren't more class actions against Tesla, one might look at this and see that the lawyers didn't make bank, and maybe future lawyers don't really see it as worth it to go up against Tesla.
The reality is that for damages related to most consumer transactions like from some $10 item to even $6,000 EAP, it's really hard for an individual consumer to sue over those and not have any recovery of damages be completely overwhelmed by lawyer fees. Without class actions, there would be zero way to hold major companies to any kind of appropriate behavior. If every single person had to sue individually, they could just run around stealing $3,000 from every customer and make even more bank than the lawyers.
Remember, Tesla here is the one that has done wrong, not the lawyers. Be annoyed that lawyers had to sue Tesla because Tesla misbehaved, not annoyed at lawyers or courts for the minimum payments you got. Be happy that at least someone with more initiative than yourself is doing their best to hold Tesla to account for their promises.