Those other endeavors scale significantly more efficiently and are a necessity.

Gold is a requirement for industrial purposes, for jewellry, for chemical processes for medication.

Visa/Mastercard perform many hundred of thousand transactions per second.

BTC is limited to 350k per day, and consumes the equivalent CO2 impact as Austria. It can't and won't ever scale, which leaves it open to market manipulation and centralization as transactions move off-chain.

It's not a small amount of energy wasted, and there are significantly more valuable uses for that energy, such as aluminum production or water desalination.