There was a proposal on Ethereum that didn't succeed (progpow) since they were already in the late stage of transitionning to PoS. Ethereum did quite a good job at keeping asic advantage moderate (the speedup was 100% max - not orders of magnitude). RandomX is basically progpow that succeeded. You might be interested in Chia's Proof of Space and Time... and how it collapsed!
ProgPow was ridiculously simple and would never have accomplished its goal. I covered it briefly in my Monerokon talk as well.
I don't know if PoW based approaches make much sense in the modern environment, anyhow -even very clever ones that provide ASIC resistance. Ethereum has been doing real proof of stake (and not delegated proof of stake which is both easier and terrible from a system safety perspective) for quite a while and it's seemingly cheap, effective, and robust.
> You might be interested in Chia's Proof of Space and Time... and how it collapsed!
Because it was written by Bram Cohen, I'd be interested in reading two or three sentences about how it collapsed.
Because it's a blockchain-based cryptocurrency, feel free to stop writing after three or four sentences.