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Because mining is dependent on the rate at which information can propagate across the network. If a mining pool is able to hear about the next block 1s sooner than another pool, it has a significant advantage when blocks only take 12s to mine. If blocks take 10min to mine, that 1s is less of an advantage.

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If miners get paid for valid blocks that don't end up included in the chain, that also makes the 1s less of an advantage. Hence GHOST. Here's the original paper [1] and a later one [2].

[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Accelerating-Bitcoin-s...

[2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/545.pdf

Sure, maybe including uncle blocks can help secure the chain. It's not without cost, however: now you're forever persisting valueless blobs of data as part of your blockchain.

It's just an extra block header every few blocks, which is a minuscule amount of data compared to the transaction records. And it's not actually valueless since the uncles are part of the block selection algorithm and therefore contribute to security.

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