I will explain the answer in parts.

make more sense to compensate the 'miners' of the network with this money?

In Stellar there is no concept of miners. In general, there are 2 common ways of validating a transaction on a blockchain network.

PoW and PoS PoW method needs miners to validate transactions. PoS method works on the principle of stake and not miners.

Stellar uses SCP also known as Stellar Consensus Protocol, which doesnt need miners.

certain amount of XLMs in your account or else you can't perform transactions

This is essentially to prevent people from making a huge number of unnecessary accounts. So the base reserve is set to 20 Lumens as of now.

I will explain the answer in parts.

make more sense to compensate the 'miners' of the network with this money?

In Stellar there is no concept of miners. In general, there are 2 common ways of validating a transaction on a blockchain network.

PoW and PoS PoW method needs miners to validate transactions. PoS method works on the principle of stake and not miners.

Stellar uses SCP also known as Stellar Consensus Protocol, which doesnt need miners.

certain amount of XLMs in your account or else you can't perform transactions

This essentially prevents people from making a huge number of unnecessary accounts. So the base reserve is set to 1.5 XLM as of now.