There is collateral damage.
But the trade-off is this: allow a certain attack from a malicious actor or potentially allow cheaper-than-usual attacks from unknown actors temporarily.
Right now the mining cartel protects us from any other potential attackers in terms of hashing. Still, not an acceptable situation.
If theres a POW upgrade what will happen to the Chinese miners? Will it be possible for them to continue to mine using the old SHA256 and fork away from the upgraded POW algorithm? I think that would be a losing move for the current developers and the ones behind them.
They can try to keep their fork alive but who wants to use a crypto completely dominated by 4 odd dudes from China? Maybe Roger and a few other lunatics? Win-win.