What you call waste is simply price for some level of security that isn’t backed by any armies.
Edit: also, no, miners aren't middlemen, that's just another misunderstanding on your part. middleman has control over the process they facilitate, miners have no control over anything but construction of blocks and how much energy they are willing to spend. you could argue miners can choose to ignore transactions coming from me (if they manage to figure out how to identify them), but it's a competition of independent parties so there will always be other miners that do not choose to ignore me. for that to be an issue big enough to call miners middlemen you'd need majority of miners to collude on something quite obvious and demonstrable, which would undermine bitcoin project itself, rendering miners' own investments in bitcoin and infrastructure worthless - not in their interest. besides, with confidential transactions this entire point will be moot.
Hold on, the response to “Bitcoin is inefficient with energy” is that efficiency doesn’t matter? That isn’t moving the goalpost so much as removing it.
Edit: seems like you've edited your message. next time try to be more polite and mark your edits.
i'm not saying efficiency doesn't matter, i'm saying primary goals of bitcoin are different.
And it is a waste. There are plenty of more efficient ways to make a transaction. I get that bitcoin is designed around this waste but that's hardly an excuse.