Proof of Work gets a bad reputation because people have a hard time wrapping their heads around why it is useful. People don't complain about all of the energy that goes into making concrete, or transporting people around, or making houses cooler, because the impact of these things is more direct and less abstract.
But proof of work has a massive benefit that - as the market shows - well outweighs the cost. Thanks to proof of work, a group of counter-parties that are all fully mutually distrusting can interact with eachother without electing a mutually trusted subset or finding a trustworthy third party to facilitate the transaction.
Within the rest of society, trust is extremely expensive. Large financial institutions are only able to operate within the context of a massive court system with a massive law enforcement arm and necessarily privacy violating technologies like KYC. Proof of Work allows us to throw all of that away and use something much simpler and more privacy preserving! You trade one expense for another, and in many cases, Proof of Work transactions are able to succeed in areas where banks could never reasonably get established. That is _massive_ value added to society. And yes, the cost is this giant proof of work engine that burns a lot of electricity. But it's not _waste_, it's serving a key purpose that nothing else is able to serve.
In areas where trust is cheaper than Proof of Work, you should use trust instead of PoW. But the world is full of places and opportunities where PoW is by far the cheapest way to get something done.
