the practice of deliberately wasting enormous amounts of energy for the purpose of being able to prove that you’ve wasted enormous amounts of energy.
C’mon, that’s being disingenuous. Back when Bitcoin was released, nobody was giving a thought to computer energy use. A consequence of proof-of-work is wasted energy, but a focus on low-power modalities and throttling have been developed in the intervening years. The prevailing paradigm at the time was, “your C/GPU is going to be burning energy anyway, you may as well do something with it.”
It was a poor design decision, but it wasn’t a malicious one like you make it sound. You may as well accuse the inventors of the internal combustion engine of designing it for the express purpose of creating pollution.