You might ask which one is easier for the average user: acquiring some ether and staking it, or acquiring a bunch of specialized computer hardware and raking in a huge electricity bill.
The fact is, that mining is only really viable in places with cheap electricity, which you said yourself. I couldn’t mine ether profitably due to the insane energy prices (~40 cents/kWh).
Rocket Pool has over 1400 node operators, and probably more in the future when the minimum stake is dropped from 16 ETH to 8 ETH or lower. That’s decentralized pooling at its best: people throw ETH into a new minipool to create a validator together, and then someone operates it. Compare that to mining pools where everyone contributes into effectively a few massive pools, in order to maximize profitability.
