I think you're wrong.

PoW was used first to drive securitizing fledgling networks and to incentivize those who profit from the system to simultaneously safeguard that system.

Nobody would sell huge bags willy nilly of BTC until 2013 and even then those people were the biggest of the whales or the most desperate. People kept their gains and didn't exit out of positions when it was just PoW.

Now, things have changed and PoS is definitely more energy efficient and more scalable and, yes, even more egalitarian. We still had to use PoW to get to this point and ETH is still PoW-driven. We have layers of programmability underneath the hood that allows for tons of coins to be PoS but they still all operate on the base layer of ETH which is to say they are all powered, literally, by mining.

We still pay miners for our transactions on ETH. If we're on Polygon or Fantom or Harmony or BSC we're still paying ETH miners for our transactions at the end of the day.