Like many things it’s a solution to a problem that’s now solved in other ways, originally it was really easy to skip town and make a new identity so they had to have enough collateral to know you’ll come back - if you’re facing two years in jail if you lose the trial or losing 5 years worth of money if you flee it’s more likely you’d turn up to court.

I guess it became a money thing at some point, the rich like it because they can avoid the same harsh laws the poor suffer, then lending money became an industry and of course they use some of the money they screw out of poor people to lobby the government to make the system even less fair… plus j imagine all sorts of clever accounting makes use of the money while in the courts hands, probably earns some kickbacks somewhere.

Abolishing it and creating a more sane modern system would be a good thing but it’d be unpopular for many reasons - but we’ve always done it like this, but we would have a budget hole, but why are they making things easier for criminals when my life is hard / climate change / war / etc… politicians don’t deal with issues like this because the voting public would punish them if they did even though the voting public largely agrees and would likely totally agree if they understood it - which they never will because their opposition will find clever ways to make it seem complicated or turn it Into a culture war issue / moral crusade.