It is essentially the same thing. The only difference is that Yield farming involves different movements of funds to maximize profits. All this requires certain skills and knowledge, in contrast to the same steaking, where you just give your funds and get a percentage of them. The good times for Yield farming were in 2020, when the DeFi hype was raging.
Personally, for now, it's much more efficient to be staking in proven pools, even the same DeFi protocols that have proven themselves since the DeFi hype of 2020. Yield farming is riskier and more costly in terms of interaction with smart contracts. Personally, I would recommend newbies to use staking and stay out of Yield farming until they have the necessary knowledge
I agree with you. If you want to set up yield farming, it takes various steps and even with the BSC network, the costs all add up quickly. I always tried to lowering the fees but than sometimes transactions got declined while you still need to pay for them. Tried the yield farming out in the past, it was a hype after all, but stopped doing it after a while. Staking is a lot easier and less worrisome.
Now that other blockchains and networks are well developed, the issue of interacting with smart contracts in yield farming is not as painful. In 2020, for example, when almost all yield farming was focused on the Ethereum blockchain, you had to interact with smart contracts very often. And those interactions were the most expensive of all the commissions and could reach several hundred dollars. And you had to pay for everything: for the transfer, for the swap, for adding LPs, for removing LPs, etc. Other than knowledge, you really had to have a lot of money to do profitable farming.
I haven't done any analysis now, and I can't claim for good returns in other blockchains, but I have a feeling that the best farming pools are still in Ethereum blockchain.
