This argument was used--by SBF and others--to justify truly absurd risk taking. I don't think it's an exaggeration to suggest that this misunderstanding may have been one of the primary drivers of Alameda's (and hence FTX's) downfall. For a group with as many smart people as EA and as many people obsessed with existential risks as EA not to have started screaming en masse when SBF suggested he would take a 51-49 bet on doubling utility or deleting all known life out of existence[1] is insane.
The mathematical misunderstanding is one part of it. Kelly betting dominates any other betting strategy in the sense that as the number of bets increases the probability that the Kelly better will have more money than someone following any other strategy approaches 1. You don't need a logarithmic utility function. If I bet Kelly and you follow some other strategy, eventually I will almost surely end up with more money and more utility than you.
I suspect another part of it is a misunderstanding by SBF (and perhaps others) of Jane Street's trading strategy. Jane Street encouraged their traders to be "risk neutral", which can be expressed as maximizing expected utility with a linear utility function. They wanted their traders to be willing to take big risks. But any individual trader is only working with a tiny fraction of Jane Street's capital, so even if they're risking all the money they've been given to work with on a bet that's still a small bet relative to the entire company. SBF seems to have taken that same risk neutral idea and applied it to the entirety of Alameda/FTX's available capital (and indeed expressed a willingness to apply it to the combined utility of the entire world), with predictably disastrous results.
[1] https://elmwealth.com/a-missing-piece-of-the-sbf-puzzle/