I did my research on staking some time back and it looked like something that I will be willing to try in the future. However all of the modes of earning passive income have risks even staking. For example, due to the volatile nature of cryptocurrencies and fall in price will easily outweigh the rewards that the individual can earn from staking. In addition, the counterparty risk. I think I will be able to take on the other risks of minimum lock up and the waiting period for each blockchain to get back my coins but can bear the former. I think that Crypto lending bears the same risks but it is even better than staking.
Yeah staking has some risks but I think there's an innovative method of it rn.
PoolX Op mentioned something similar. APr recorded is pretty good too in a short while and it's flexible.
Staking is only profitable if the coins you are dealing with has an upward growth. Otherwise, you will just be wasting your resources and will wait for negative ROI. That is the dilemma of most stakers as well as farmers, if the coin or token is not increasing its value, you will be on the negative end of this endeavour.
I have tried staking and farming, and I can say, I won't consider it as low risk because if you happen to deal with alts whose growth is declining and not the upward movement, you are screwed. And knowing the alt market, we all know that very few of these alts can grow overtime, let alone survive. So if you can't keep up with their developments, better not to involve yourself to that project. Because in most cases, you will be holding bag of worthless coins/tokens once you decide to discard them in the market. Most of them are only good for short-term trading. Once you hold them longer, they can easily lose value because most of them have crappy background.
I get your point buddy and fears alike. However, you'd advert your mind to the fact that passive earning opportunities are still very integral.
I'd recommend you looking into frameworks like PoolX on Bitget, you just need to simply stake USDT or $BGB to Mine other tokens you believe in. Tokens like $ONG and $APRS ranked as one among the top tokens you'd stake to earn recently.