Describe please how a decentralized ledger without a native token incentivizes participation?

Sure, participation (of miners) could be funded by outside capital, but then the question becomes, how to distribute it? How to see which outside actor has which share of the funding? Such a system sounds a lot like political party funding in the US, and I would describe that as 'partisan' and 'toxic' long before I would use the term 'decentralized'.
...