Electricity per transaction is an extremely poor way to communicate anything useful. It says nothing about the actual harm of Bitcoin and only leaves readers (and bloggers) drawing their own conclusions.
if sending someone a dollar through venmo costs $0.0000001 worth of electricity and sending someone a dollar through the bitcoin network costs $1 doesn't that communicate everything you need to know?
Only if the transactions do not have any fee. If they have a transaction fee, this indirectly increases the difficulty of mining future blocks (since the miners get more Bitcoin per block, they can use more energy per block before their expected net return is negative, and they are incentivized to do so through competition with other miners; the Bitcoin difficulty adjustment then notices the increase in hash rate and increases the difficulty).