It is the best interest of all miners (and the damn pools) to do the following -

An entity that has significant hash rate (a farm of ASICs) might be willing to solo mine Bitcoin. For example, perhaps they expect to mine an average of 1 block per week. They are willing to wear the variance (could be 2 or 3 blocks in a week, or perhaps none!). They know this is healthy for the network (they validate, instead of pools). They also don’t need to pay pool fees.

0000000000000000000237c2f124061d3ec0dd0c423116138b993f96053d4502

I suspect many let their renewable/green conscience cloud their view of PoW, lowering their security standards and commitment towards hard computer science (and hard money). Too often is Proof of Stake (PoS) given as the solution to the apparent problem of “energy wastage”. While the pursuit of clean large-scale renewables is absolutely valid for the world, PoW does not (nor should it) care where energy is sourced. Energy is in abundance worldwide, much of it clean and stranded. Geography is not an issue for Bitcoin. Bitcoin (PoW) is in a unique position to explore and exploit alternative forms of energy. There is a natural incentive to race towards $0.00/kWh, where non-renewables cannot compete.

Rolling checkpoints is security theatre. It’s all relative to where the node sits on the network graph. Chaos would ensue if there were was ever sustained contention at the fork tip, with nodes all over the world “locking” themselves to random checkpoints. Nodes won’t trust the honest chain even after the honest chain overtakes the attacker’s chain.