Bringing more decentralization to Bitcoin is not easy. As long as the reliance on proof-of-work remains in place, centralization will remain a pressing threat. As the network becomes “bigger’, finding a solution becomes even more difficult. If this trend continues, China will control Bitcoin in every way one can imagine. It controls the hashrate, the mining hardware production, and most mining pools as well. Not an ideal situation for a decentralized currency whatsoever.
Switching from Proof-of-work to something else is not a logical evolution. However, sticking with the current PoW-oriented Bitcoin could eventually cause more problems, friction, and centralization. Bitcoin Core developers will have to come up with a creative solution to effectively counter these problems
Whether or not Bitcoin can survive without proof-of-work remains a big question. It is true miners can be seen as a “problem” in many different ways. They are the ones determining the future of Bitcoin by supporting or rejecting scaling solutions. The regular user has absolutely no say in the current Bitcoin ecosystem, unfortunately. Bringing power back to the people is not straightforward. A new hard fork is not necessarily the answer either. Something has to change sooner rather than later. How that change will be enforced, remains to be determined.