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But in Bitcoin's case it's the same, even the article mentions that "doing today’s calculations would “consume way more power than is generated on the entire planet” if it were done using the CPUs available when Bitcoin launched in 2009.". Energy used when mining Bitcoin could also be considered incidental, the goal is to calculate hashes.

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No it wouldn't because increasing energy efficiency of the bitcoin miners just means that the difficulty will rise until you're back to the same power consumption. The power consumption depends on the block reward and transaction fees.

>Energy used when mining Bitcoin could also be considered incidental, the goal is to calculate hashes.

The goal isn't to calculate hashes. That is the incidental part. The goal is to have a randomly chosen node create one block every X seconds.

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