The first bitcoins were mined at higher rate than today with 3 cpus. there is no minimum amount of work to pull out to mine a bitcoin, it's only relative to the network economic worth.
and gold in the times of the egyptians, romans and even upto the american wild west, were done via pickaxes finding gold nuggets the size of potato's
but now its more gold dust requiring shifting tonnes of dirt per ounce using excavators
someone with a pickaxe today will not get the same reward as someone with a excavator and sluice machine today.
there is actually minimal work. its called the difficulty.
you have to processes trillions of hashes to find a block solution.
at todays cost
a raspberry pi will take decades to get lucky.
a mining farm of 500 asics will find 1 a day.
a pool(gold quarry) could combine loads of workers and combine efforts, but a single worker doesnt get the whole reward... its shared based on work done. (division of labour) so a small worker will only get a few sats for his few penny electric work
i know your stuck in the PoS narative that the only sole user that signs a block gets the reward, but bitcoins PoW is nothing like PoS solo signing
But its the network value who is driving the hashrate up not the otherway around. Bitcoin could work perfectly with a total market cap of 1$ and 3 raspberry pi mining it. You would have exactly the same amount of bitcoin being mined at the same rate.