Especially because mining is a business that you can fail at if you don't balance costs and income properly.
That's much preferable to proof of stake where early investors can just squat on their coins indefinitely with almost zero cost to maintain their authority percentage forever.
Except if the community at large doesn't like how a particular staker/validator is doing their job, the staker's assets can be burned in a hard fork that enjoys sufficient broad legitimacy. The capital can be outright destroyed. In contrast, there is no way a community in a proof of work system can burn a particular miners hardware if that miner becomes able to abuse the network. At most they could change the mining algo, but that wipes all miners out, and such a change can really only happen once.
