Many services can be protected by bitcoin. Most haven't realized the power of doing so. Projects like @TollGate require bitcoin payments to access wifi, @routstr requires cashu tokens as authorization to access api calls. Whirlpool Tx0 is an anti sybil attack fee. That is protecting these services from exploitation by enforcing real world physical costs on abusers in the form of a hardcoded bitcoin payment.
The focus of computing has always been to try and be more efficient not less. To use abstract power not physical power.
Bitcoin is inefficient physical power. It takes lots of real power to change the state. That means any would be attacker must use real power to exploit it.
Using logic as the constraint, ie more code to restrict other code never works because there is always a way to exploit the code. Even now people are discussing whether quantum computing can overcome encryption. More logic defeating logic.
You can't fake a bitcoin payment. It requires real world costs.
Tollgates, payment walls, fees, or anyway you wish to describe a bitcoin payment, a state change requiring real world physical power, as a requirement to take any further action secures the user from exploitation.
If it cost you a bitcoin to read my emails no one is going to incur that cost. If you can just hack google then they are nearly free. The payment is a real world physical cost not abstract hacks.
We have plenty of ways to physically protect private keys. Using stolen bitcoin from compromised keys doesn't change the requirement for a bitcoin payment as a gatekeeper. Signing a message using a compromised key doesn't undermine the power the key bestows. You don't really own bitcoin, you protect the key that grants you access to signing for bitcoin.
We currently think that those keys grant you access to dollars. But they are also access to a digital securtiy protocol that can constrain unlimited abstract hacks.
It being onerous to obtain bitcoin is a part of the point of putting your systems behind a bitcoin wall of energy.
I would love it if that I had to send myself a payment to transfer the title of my home or open a line of credit or any number of actions today that result in fraud and abuse. Want to change my address, send my medical records, let me vote.. secure it by bitcoin and put me in control.
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If you secure any of that data with encryption, then you don't need bitcoin. Emails? Encrypt them and a Google hack is still fruitless. Change address, require a key sigature, moving the Bitcoin requires the same but costs mining fees, a signature costs nothing but a few CPU cycles. You're adding unneeded costs. Cryptography already defends against the phsical realm. No amount of kinetic energy can break a signature, or encryption. Why spend sats if this is true? Requiring bitcoin as payment to decrypt or receive a digital signature is fine, but that's just one size of the trade. The other is just cryptography. No value transfer needed.
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I tend to see the added costs as added security. For example if encrypted data keys were compromised and on the other hand bitcoin keys were compromised... the attacker would have to want what the bitcoin gave them access to more than the bitcoin. Whereas if the attacker had the encrypted keys, as you say, it "costs nothing" for the attacker to gain access.
I don't see it as an either or. It can be an and.