One of the things that I'm trying to say in the article, though, is that it's not super helpful to lump all blockchains together.

Bitcoin is an impossible-to-dislodge behemoth that in my opinion fails to meet its original goals and has had ample chance to prove its worth, but has largely failed to do so.

Stuff like Solana is still "wasteful" in the sense that leaving a Digital Ocean droplet running in an infinite loop is wasteful, but it's on such a different order of magnitude that it certainly deserves a chance to prove its worth. It's also had much less time to do so than Bitcoin.

As mentioned above: I'm a noob at all of this and reserve for myself the right to flip-flop in the future :-)