LOL, man, it's nuts out there. People have no common sense anymore.
POW is still my first love as I am a hardware nut. Ethereum's devs and foundations never gave a crap about the mining community. Just really treated it like crap, so why do we think they will do better for validators? Oh, that's right, they are all foundation and exchange validators, lol.
As there are flaws in both ecosystems, I am so much more in favor of the POW consensus. That's why when I get to the farm next year, there is going to be some solar and wind-powered Monero mining going on, lol.
Pick a POW chain, and I guarantee they are way more 'decentralized' than any POS chain.
I have been working in the Cosmos ecosystem for several months with a validator team, and I will say the centralization is utterly ridiculous.
Hive has its own issues with that in my opinion, but, I do get the argument of how it works, in a way, but, it's still way too centralized with 20 plus the 1 rotational witness, just my opinion.
Anyway, Bitcoin mining is actually forcing people to explore different types of alternative energy production to keep the machines hashing, so if anything, mining is doing great things for the energy industry as well.