Except if the community at large doesn't like how a particular staker/validator is doing their job, the staker's assets can be burned in a hard fork that enjoys

Except if the community at large doesn't like how a particular staker/validator is doing their job, the staker's assets can be burned in a hard fork that enjoys sufficient broad legitimacy. The capital can be outright destroyed. In contrast, there is no way a community in a proof of work system can burn a particular miners hardware if that miner becomes able to abuse the network. At most they could change the mining algo, but that wipes all miners out, and such a change can really only happen once.