I don't know why there are many people who remain to follow that charlatan.
One word: profit.
Although it is a little more complicated than that. It is one of humanity's traits that they don't want to accept they were wrong.
Nobody can deny the big pumps that ethereum had in the past which has given a lot of profit to many people and worst of all has given hope of future profits to a lot more who are now bag holders. They do not want to accept that they were wrong about this whole thing being a sham even though ETH has gotten dumped so much in the past 5 years without being capable of seeing its ATH against bitcoin ever again.
We also don't know why, like OP, many people also remain to look for a "Replacement for POW". Bitcoin is proven hard money because it set and made sure that no entity can "print"/issue the money of the system for free. But because Ethereum developers threw away POW, the most important part of their network, they might have broken they're incentive structure by allowing their network to print money for free. I truly thought Ethereum would also be a multi-generational blockchain before the transition to POS.