1) Bitcoin has never not been in an inflationary period. Every 10 minutes or so, more gets printed.
2) There's no technical reason this can't continue forever - whoever controls 51% of the network can dictate the rules. Yes, the network could fork if the rules changed, but its impossible to say which network would be more successful.
The reality is that Bitcoin already objectively uses a lot of energy by design, and the problem will only get worse if its price goes up.
They seem to be saying that traditional finance uses a lot of energy but we're mostly okay with that because we find financial products and services useful.
Bitcoin also uses a lot of energy, but it's only a "waste" if you think it's providing no value. Bitcoin is one of the few ways to buy "hard money" and if you value that the energy is not being wasted, it's being spent on provisioning a valuable service.
Orders of magnitude less than the amount of energy being "wasted" sustaining the millions of employees of the banking industry. I use scare quotes because the energy is being spent, not wasted.
> I mean what would be left except for just buying into the pyramid scheme, and ransomware payments
It's hard to give you the benefit of the doubt when you clearly haven't bothered to understand the argument for Bitcoin's value proposition.
Hard money (i.e. money which cannot be inflated) has valuable economic properties, and many people think that a hard money is concomitantly a valuable long-term investment/store of value.