[casi]

You can participate in most(all i am aware of) PoS chains with any amount of underlying tokens, in the same way you can participate in a mining pool if you lack the hashrate to mine independently.

There will be independent PoS validators who can afford upfront costs, but there are independent miners too who purchase lots of hardware. In PoS the next block is randomly distributed, so those with better hardware dont outperform. So you can validate off a solar powered raspberry pi or nuc if you'd like and not underperform someone with a highend gpu, so the hardware cost is much lower, added to this in long run it will be cheaper to participate in staking than having to replace gpus/asics to mine with.

I don't see how this leads you to think it is unfair in comparison to mining? Upfront costs pretty similar, running costs cheaper, long term hardware replacement costs much less.