On the other hand, without the PoW mechanism of Bitcoin, it's impossible to have the properties that bitcoin has - global decentralised money and payment network. If you believe otherwise, make one! Very quickly no one will be willing to pay for Bitcoin, and all those "wasted electricity" will suddenly become available again.
To be clear, I'm not saying either of these is "correct". My entire point here is that everyone talking about "waste" is just imposing their own private value system on everyone else and I've yet to see a single person apply some kind of consistent standard for what should and shouldn't be banned
The difference is that, for videogames or mining physical rocks, the power use is an undesired side effect, so the incentive is to minimize it, while for POW cryptocurrencies, the power use is an essential component of the mechanism they use to prevent double spending, and the incentive is to use as much as possible.
POW could be replaced by the more efficient POS, but network effects make that highly unlikely without government intervention.
And replacing unstable fiat money with even less stable, totally speculatory crypto like Bitcoin? Seems like it's better just to buy some USD and stash it somewhere. Hell, even buying and reselling Steam keys is probably less volatile.