Suppose you wanted a distributed system where arbitrary nodes can enter without vetting. You'd need to be robust to adversarial nodes that lie and collude. Distributed consensus under asynchrony and adversaries seriously ramps up the difficulty of already challenging problems typically solved by Paxos derived algorithms. The first moderately scalable solution to consensus within such a hostile environment and with relatively few moving parts was built on a proof of work scheme inspired by hashcash. It's not inefficient, it's just a complex domain.

It should be noted that NFTs run on Ethereum which has been in the process of moving to the vastly more efficient proof of stake scheme.

> Patreon's been solving the problem of "open source funding" for about a decade without that part.

There are a number of developing nations whose citizens cannot participate on Patreon. For others, there are workarounds that involve hurdles like navigating providers with worse customer service rep than paypal, giving out sensitive identification, high fees, high withdrawal friction and chaining various third parties who themselves might disappear or be indirectly connected to fraudulent banks.

A problem of PoW based consensus, and will not be relevant to PoS/X based consensus.

> absurdly inefficient distributed database.

A decentralized distributed database with read/append commands available to any participant.

> Patreon

A centralized company.

You're not wrong, but you aren't making any points that people who are interested in crypto don't already know, or care about.