I had a lot of doubts too about the pace of dev but the shadowforks and ropsten testnet makes me thing it's going to happen.
I think that even if the devs don't care about the price, they care about the image and they want to get rid of the stigma that eth is bad for the environment.
When that stigma became so widespread is when eth went all in on the PoS development.
If ETH PoS was the end all solution of PoS, we wouldn't need Mina. Everyone would just focus on making ETH PoS better (or just getting it shipped). In a similar way that there is just one Bitcoin, the rest of the contenders (BCH/BSV) are just shitcoins nobody cares about.
Instead, we have dozens of competing PoS chains which have little value, debatable security (there just isn't enough of a financial / political target to attack, yet), and even less real world utility (because nobody is developing apps for them). While ETH PoS is sitting there with broken unit tests.
Hopefully that explains my arguments a bit better.
PoS opens up its own can of worms. Namely, it is vastly more complicated and not as well understood or executed in as large of a scale as PoW currently is. The Merge is honestly terrifying to me given the amount of money on the line.
As a software engineer who's built large distributed systems. I've always relied heavily on having robust test suites so that I know that when I'm deploying code, there is little risk of failure. In this case, the devs have had years to get the test suite passing [1] and the plan is to launch in a few months. I really wish that this was looking a bit better than it is at this point.
There also isn't a published set of plans for what happens if things go wrong. We could end up with a forked chain and ETC situation again and I'm not sure it would survive that.
So yea... I'm optimistic, but I'm also a doubter. I'm more than fine with them taking as long as they need to get it right. The current rush seems entirely unnecessary to me. Especially since the devs claim they don't care about the price.
[1] https://hivetests2.ethdevops.io/