Because vehicles bring value (transport people, food, resources, etc) and have energy optimisations (mass transit, electric, etc) because the energy use as a gatekeeper is not an inherent part of its functionality.

I’d be shocked if video games as an industry outranked crypto for energy use. Even if we assume all gamers run their GPU’s at 100% the entire time they play games, miners will quickly dwarf the energy usage because games don’t play 24/7.

Machine Learning is computationally expensive, but unlike crypto, is basically constantly trying to make their systems faster and more efficient all the time. Again-computation isn’t used as a gatekeeper here. There’s no “hash this pointlessly until enough work as been done so you can do x”, it’s just “do this work as quickly and efficiently as possible”. Things like TPU’s in ML aren’t a threat or arms race, they’re a net improvement.

Crypto gets targeted for its energy use because it uses an insane amount of energy for even the most rudimentary functions. Even if current payment processors use the same amount of energy right now as crypto does, you have to consider the relative scales: those payment processors handle the vast, vast majority of payments with that energy; scaling current crypto up to that levels would bring its energy use to astronomical levels.