Recently, someone was again treating LST/re-staking as "free gains," and I couldn't help but find it a bit funny.

Honestly, there are only two types of gains: one is the basic reward from staking in the first place, and the other is the subsidy/incentive you get by using the same security to serve as "collateral" for other protocols.
Where does the subsidy come from? Either the project team is burning money to buy TVL, or downstream businesses genuinely have cash flow; it can't just appear out of nowhere.
The risks are pretty straightforward: stacking layers increases the chance of something going wrong—smart contract bugs, oracles, malicious nodes, penalty mechanisms, liquidity runs—eventually, all of these can turn that "redeemable certificate" in your hand into a de-pegged asset, ruining the ideal.
Once the funding rate starts behaving abnormally, or liquidation zones pile up like a landfill, I’d rather earn less than be passively providing liquidity.
By the way, the NFT royalty debates are the same: everyone wants to take more, but when secondary markets cool down, no one pretends to be noble—liquidity is king.
That’s all for now.