staking and mining are both okay if you are one the earliest.
if you are late then mining beats staking if you can scale. if that staking thing turns to shit it is done, while in mining you can shift to another thing.
Yes agree early stage very important. I saw people who got from coinlist at he beggining for couple of cents coin and they kept farming those coins now they got way expensive.
being early is the name of the game from day 1, that is why premine and instamine was invented..to be the earliest of the earliest hehe

This is ostensibly untrue. Granted the way to get 1000x is to be in premine, VC or seed round. But you can also get good capital appreciation and/or yield from even being moderately early in buying from an exchange. I was nowhere near early rounds and have ALWAYS felt I was too late but did pretty well with Link, BNB/Cake, Matic and Avax. You need to be able to be attentive to the ecosystem as a whole to see good things coming.
I find it reasonable to mine and then stake the mined coin. Then use a bit of the eth to speculate. Again, ymmv.