Proof of Stake and 51% Attacks

I've been reading up on Proof-of-Stake for ETH2, and had a question on 51% attacks. The docs I've read suggest that such an attack would require owning 51% of all ETH, and so attacking the integrity of the system would be counterproductive since they're already heavily invested in the coin.

What I don't understand is why such an attack would require 51% of all ETH. Wouldn't it just require owning 51% of all validators? The amount of ETH tied up in validators will surely be only a small fraction of the total ETH in circulation, will it not? For example, if there are 250k validators staked at 32 coins each, that's 8M ETH. But that's less than 7% of the 120M ETH in circulation. So wouldn't an attacker just need to spend 8M ETH to create 251k validators, and control the entire 120M network?

What am I missing here?

Edit:

My concern is not that someone can use such an attack to acquire more ETH than they should be entitled to. My concern is that there is value in crashing the ETH network - whether financial via leveraged short positions against the coin's exchange rate, or political e.g. by disrupting the economy of El Salvador. Absent any control limiting the amount of ETH not part of a stake, the cost of a 51% attack will fluctuate significantly, but will be far less than 51% of all ETH. In fact, as validators naturally experience turnover, if the price of the coin continues to rise, I would expect validators to naturally become more concentrated over time.

From ethereum.org on 51% attacks:

There's very little incentive to destroy the value of a currency you have a majority stake in.

Here, majority stake refers to ETH's technical "stake" term, but the argument makes it sound like it's the common English usage, i.e. "to have a majority stake in" meaning "to own a majority of the currency". This makes the network sound more robust than it is against this kind of attack.