It's also not fair because a company can actually "go away" as in they sell the building and stop operating.

You can't really do this with bitcoin. It's never going to "shut down".

This is why some people think it could be a perpetual ponzi scheme/bubble... price goes up, people get interested, price shoots up, more people get interested, price drops down, a lot of people lose their shirts, but other people will think, "Oh, Bitcoin is cheap now, I should get into that!". I guess until you run out of people, or until it's ruled "illegal" that the pool of people shrinks.

If nobody mines it then it really can go away.

If everybody woke up at once, came to their senses, and realized bitcoin was all just a waste of time and literal energy, and turned off their machines, bitcoin would be "shut down".

It takes a cynical person indeed to think that Bitcoin is “a waste of time”. Love it or hate it, it’s an amazing idea.

Waste of energy, however, is harder to argue with. Hence PoS etc.

Nope, because then the next day someone would start mining again in the hope that people would want BTC someday.

That is a wild assumption.

True - it's society's value on the exchange of bitcoin to $USD that could go to $0. The ledger of all those transactions would still be out there.