At best, it’s economic rent with holders getting free money from workers.

The workers are the ones securing the network. Anybody can participate, providing they have as little as 0.01 ETH to put up as collateral.

The workers - people with jobs - are not securing the Ethereum network. The rich can more easily afford the opportunity cost and transaction costs of staking, and thus get a higher percentage return than the poor with mostly cash reserves. It recreates the feedback cycle we're seeing with the dollar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent

At worst, it’s a game of musical chairs that only people who don’t use the money can win. Profits from securing the network ought to automatically adjust towards zero.

Ethereum base fees are in fact sent to a burn address and removed from circulation. Validators get priority tips only.

I'm talking about net profits, not base fees. You would need something like difficulty adjustment.

PoS is why Ethereum bailed out everyone with money in the DAO.

PoS is unrelated to the DAO hack.

No, it was related. I was an ETH user myself until then. The reason they did the bailout was because they were afraid the hacker would risk PoS.

And there wasn't a strong consensus. They explicitly said "the code is the contract" and pointed towards the code itself when asked about design intent before the hack. Those of us who disagreed with the bailout just left.

You know which other project did a rollback when it was less than 2 years old? Value overflow incident - Bitcoin Wiki

This was a bug in Bitcoin, not a bug in a user-created smart contact. Ethereum was working perfectly at the time of the hack.

There was a chance to rollback 500,000 ETH to an entity managed by one of its co-founders, and the community overwhelmingly rejected it. Rollbacks do not happen on Ethereum.

Not doing it every time proves that these co-founders were not as influential as Vitalik Buterin (who had invested in the DAO). The DAO hacker's money was rolled back with a hard fork.

The entire value prop of Bitcoin is that it's ossified and simple.

That would make altcoins worthwhile, wouldn't it! The value proposition of Bitcoin has not changed since it was the most complicated cryptocurrency.

Each Bitcoin halving reduces the block reward for miners ... so unless the price just goes up forever as Bitcoin literally burns the planet, the result is a decrease in the overall hashrate of the network, allowing for an easier attack.

This is addressed in the Bitcoin whitepaper. A block's transaction fees alone are already worth more than the total block reward used to be.