the energy consumption is my biggest criticism, so the answer is "no" (even though you try to sidestep that). buying a pack of gum with bitcoin could power a whole house for 2 months, that's awful and irresponsible.
Bitcoin's energy bills are paid for by its users via transaction fees and inflation. It's a weird form of gatekeeping to single out Bitcoin as 'a waste' when plenty of people create economic waste buying large houses, buying makeup, buying meat instead of grains, etc etc.
If you are concerned about the environment, regulate the creation of energy, not the use of energy. Restricting Bitcoin on environmental concerns will just result in people using more energy elsewhere. But if you mandate that power plants must be X efficient and Y sustainable, the market will naturally figure out how to best allocate the limited energy.
Edit: This wasn't intended to be a hypothetical- I agree BTC uses significantly more per transaction, but I'm curious how it compares to the entirety of a system like Mastercard divided by number of transactions (including all employee/office space/commute/etc energy consumption). There are clearer/fewer inputs for Bitcoin for sure but that doesn't mean we shouldn't account for the total environmental cost of a behemoth like Mastercard.
Bitcoin can never and should never replace our current payments network as it simply cannot scale in its current form. But, I do think people simply look at the cost to run the technology itself and assume that's the total environmental cost of a system.
You should also include the cost of running all of the world's central banks.
US Federal Reserve budget is about $5B. Assuming 328.5k BTC mined per year, no tx fees, $20k BTC value, and mining at break even, mining energy costs are about $6.57B. It seems like they're on the same order of magnitude.
I am more concerned about the misaligned incentives for PoW, and to a lesser extent for PoS.