Your tone seems to be that it's either allocate by price or by standing in line.

But it's analogous to toilet paper. If you are limited to one package per trip through the checkout line, yes, you can consider that to be allocating by willingness to stand in line. But the intent is simply to have a (not terribly strict) quota, and not to have you go through many times.

So it isn't as fundamentally screwed up as proof-of-work. Nobody is supposed to actually treat it that way.