Locked capital is capital that can't do anything else
Staking natively earns rewards, but it comes with a tradeoff that's easy to underweight when you're only looking at the yield number: the staked tokens are typically locked. Once bonded to a validator, those tokens usually can't be sold, transferred, or used as collateral until they're unstaked, and unstaking itself often takes days or weeks depending on the network. During that entire window, the capital is committed to exactly one activity, earning staking rewards, and nothing else.
That exclusivity has a cost even when the staking yield itself looks attractive. Holding a liquid, unstaked token means being able to react: sell into a market move, post it as collateral for a loan, provide it to a liquidity pool, or redeploy it into whatever opportunity shows up next. A staker gives all of that up in exchange for a reward rate. If comparable yield or better liquidity is available elsewhere, or if the staker simply wants optionality, native staking starts to look like a worse deal than the headline reward suggests, purely because of what the locked capital can no longer do.