"Users pay a fee in NYM to send their data through the mixnet. By pledging an initial bond of NYM, anyone can run a mix node."

Crypto is completely needless in this scenario. If you're mixing traffic, you've no need for pseudonymous payments, and creating yet another random crypto means the "reward" for running infrastructure -- only able to be potentially gained once you'e pledged your initial bond, mind you -- is also tied into something that has no real-world value.

Tor works without crypto BS, or needing excuses to say why it's "better" than useless number-crunching.

If your only incentive to decentralizing the network is the currrenly-meaningless "economic" reward, you're going about the whole thing wrong -- some "NYM" neocoin is of little value to someone who has their own infrastructure costs running a VPS for the node (once you've set up your NYM wallet first, of course)

The focus right now is the crypto push, and - by their own admission - not optimizing the throughput, which means node operators face higher costs for less reward.

It's Tor -- but with a cryptocurrency that will make someone else rich.

Is there any privacy-friendly crypto compute resource network willing to just drop the BS and use Monero?

How is it better than Tor?

Can Nym tokens be mined from nothing by participating, or must they be purchased first?

Is there any technical reason why the network needs a native token and incentivization can't be made via e.g. lightning payments or similar?

Yes, there is a cryptocurrency involved, but that's self-contained, rewarding uptime and throughput (not useless number crunching), and a way to make the system balance out between users and infrastructure.