Increasing efficiency is a huge aspect of every other field in computing with companies literally spend 10’s of billions of dollars increasing efficiency of software and hardware every year.
It’s directly offensive to many people in the field that an inefficient first implementation is maintained because people’s investments in hardware are considered more valuable than anything else. Not latency, not transactions per second, not environmental costs, just maximize the value of their hardware investments.
Completely understandable, yet still horrific.
It seems to me that crypto is being unfairly singled out. Things that are digital have meaningful existence.