If PoW weren't a climate disaster it would have very obvious appeal due to its orders of magnitude simpler implementation.
Edit: You can learn more here -- https://consensys.net/blog/news/the-state-of-the-merge-an-up...
Even outside of any hypothetical technical complexity, a system that explicitly pushes all the power to those with the most money seems antithetical to the point.
- Solana - Cardano - XRP - Terra - Polkadot - Avalanche - Polygon
That's the majority of actual chains in the top 20, since many of the rest are tokens running on top of other chains (USDT, USDC, SHIB, BUSD, &c)
In general, starting a clone of proof-of-stake Ethereum is a very popular way to make a new chain.
As for the philosophical point, PoW isn't really different. It takes tremendous capital investment to produce enough hash rate to ever mine a BTC. These are all more or less systems in which the rich get richer and the not-rich get to gamble.
There are dozens of new networks launched over the last two years, they are all PoS.
> Even outside of any hypothetical technical complexity, a system that explicitly pushes all the power to those with the most money seems antithetical to the point.
What power do PoS stakers have? They select the order of transactions. That's it. The goal is to distribute this role across enough people so that they cannot collude to censor a transaction. That's essentially the only goal.
Three of the top 10 by market cap are already on proof-of-stake.