Which is what makes it even more absurd that people are claiming that adding centralized layers on top of Bitcoin is a valid solution to the cost and speed of transactions.

They're devoted to Bitcoin itself above any of the reasons why the technology was built in the first place. But if people don't actually care about having distributed payments, and if they're perfectly willing to buy into payment processors that are only using Bitcoin as a store-of-value in the backend, then Proof of Work doesn't matter.

Proof of Work/Stake only matter if Bitcoin is actually being used as a trustless and anonymous payment system for regular transactions, which is ironically the task that (among most other cryptocurrencies on the market) it's perhaps least suited for technologically.

I'm not saying there's no innovation here. I am saying that I don't see any evidence that Bitcoin's largest proponents care about that innovation. I don't see any evidence that any of this matters beyond giving them an excuse to hype a speculative asset. If they did care, they would have abandoned Bitcoin and moved to basically any other coin -- anything at all that did Proof of Stake to reduce transaction fees and environmental costs, or that fixed its price to the dollar, or that had better privacy.

I firmly believe at this point that the technology of Bitcoin matters to the majority of its investors about as much as the technology of Beanie Babies mattered to its investors. That's not to say the technology isn't interesting or that it can't be used in useful ways, but most of the time that people talk about Bitcoin's success, they're not talking about technology.