I think the correct comparison is against the Bloomberg Terminal, through which the vast majority of capital flows responsible for environmental damage, occur. Not only does the terminal itself use a vast amount of power with its humongous do-it-all servers and 8-screen users, but the facilitated capital flows, commodity trading, speculation, are probably responsible for 2-3 orders of magnitude more environmental damage than proof of work.
Corroborate the "some libraries now feel unmaintained" view given elsewhere. Also the language itself and best practise seems to change now quite often and there's a bit of a tendency to do things in multiple ways through shorthand macros which can be a bit confusing (bit of the LISP problem going on here). That said the structure of my code is vastly better than when I was doing everything in Python trying to use multiprocessing and/or threads and/or asyncio.