I think when a blockchain network begins as POS, this is correct. It's almost impossible to distribute the funds in a way that doesn't benefit the early adopter

I think when a blockchain network begins as POS, this is correct. It's almost impossible to distribute the funds in a way that doesn't benefit the early adopters, because they need to stake a large chunk of the available supply to secure the network against attacks. But Ethereum didn't begin as POS, it began as POW and has been POW for 6 years now. They allowed anyone to participate in the pre-sale in 2014 and got BTC deposits from thousands of people to bootstrap the network. As a result, no one has more than 1% of ETH supply. Vitalik himself has about 300K ETH or so (less than half a percent). BTC Proof-of-Work today requires large amounts of capital to earn new coins and already ~89% of the supply has been mined. To mine the last 11%, you need massive datacenters filled with ASIC miners, access to massive amounts of electricity, and you need to spend capex on upgrades the whole way. There's no perfect solution as each approach have trade-offs, but at least Ethereum is a platform. Anyone can launch a token on top of the platform, create a protocol like Uniswap and turn it into a multi-billion dollar DAO.