The confusion seems to be that since bitcoin wastes more it is more secure,
that is a false assumption, it only means it wastes more nothing else.
At the end of every day, 4 pool operators control bitcoin destiny,
where as every decent PoS coin is secured by many more than 4 people.
Change pool operators to exchange and there you have the guys that can control your "destiny".
Coincheck was holding 10% of the entire NEM supply on their exchange when they were hacked.
Binance currently hold around 210k bitcoins in their identified cold wallets, god knows how many they actually have in storage.
And don't start with people holding their coins in their own wallets and stake them, the same could be said about miners going solo mining, none of the two will happen.
I actually don't like PoW, I've always warned people here that if we reach insane values of 50k before the halving the number of miners plugging in would drive energy consumption to an insane level so much as it would start to influence energy prices.
But, misquoting
Beorn here,
"I don't like PoW, with its electricity consumption driven by greed...but PoS, I hate more".
This would also end the nonsense of non-mining nodes as all nodes could be staking nodes
and since they earn profit end the nonsense that the blocksize can't be increased because people can't afford to upgrade their hardware.
And slowly the nodes would start to be run by companies, offering you a share of the profit if you deposit your coins, people would start depositing those as they do in a bank to gain interest, solo staking would turn into a useless business, and guess what the outcome would be? Back to square 1.