I agree, there are much better consensus methods than Proof of Work. It's just that PoW is by far the most simple to implement. If you just take a peak at the ecosystem, especially around 2013-2015, it seems like every "altcoin" project had created their own consensus system. Of course, many of these were terrible.. but it's a good sign that this space has been trying to get away from regular ol' PoW since people started really finding out about Bitcoin.

Peercoin invented the core basis of the PoS algorithm in 2012 that was used throughout the 2013 and 2014 altcoin craze. This is still being used today in various projects, in augmented forms. Some projects tried to incentivize not just holding coins, but also making transactions (PoSV/proof of stake velocity, IIRC). Some projects tried making it so that you must burn coins to create blocks (proof of burn). And some projects tried doing genuinely useful computations instead of plain proof of work, such as doing protein unfolding (I think this was Curecoin?)... And then Dash invented the dBPF algorithm which is used by numerous coins today beyond just Dash and is similar to PoS but with a set number of stakers. (usually elected through an election on the blockchain)

If you look beyond Bitcoin there is a ton of innovation taking place in this space, and there has been for some time now. A lot of it is mired in scams, trolls, shills, and FUD.. but there is some genuinely awesome innovation happening in this space to drive forward consensus algorithms.

(source: co-founder of Qtum, a project in this space)