There's some difference between "so they can dismiss claims about wastefulness" and "so it isn't wasteful" but that's a pretty small distinction. I don't really care which of those two is a bigger motivator.
Or perhaps the bust is a great time to generate some credulous positive news coverage.
Likely because you don't actually follow the development milestones, and are just synthesizing a conclusion based on social media headlines/comments.
Successful testnets for the merge have been launched and merge execution from a shadow-fork of the mainnet to a PoS testnet have been completed in the last 2 months. As far as I am aware, no merge date has ever been set and all previous timelines were speculation, not missed deadlines.
I would recommend people sign up for an ETH feed or newsletter (e.g. the ETH Foundation blog https://blog.ethereum.org/2022/03/23/finalized-no-34/) and stop letting naive comments on hacker news/reddit/twitter dictate their opinions on the state of things like crypto.
I'm not deep in that world, but as far as I can tell (from wandering on the blog you posted) there still aren't any deadlines to miss.
As we all know, strategic ambiguity is a hallmark of any good financial system.
The last date was supposed to be around June, but seems like that will get pushed to August (or later) now. Yes, it is comical that the dates keep slipping.
That said, changing the consensus model for a network with multi billion $'s worth of value stored in it, isn't something you just do with a lot of thoughts and prayers. I don't blame them for taking their time with this transition.
Except that it is.
Imagine promising your clients and telling them to wait 'for a year' for the team to fix these fundamental issues in your product and have them lose millions on your missed estimates whilst you keep postponing and delaying the fixes for 5 years.
At some point, these clients will give up waiting and move elsewhere. Happened to the first NFT project on Ethereum (CryptoKitties) and now BAYC is considering doing the same.
So given that situation, the longer they delay and postpone it the worse it gets.
The transition to ETH2 (which is also now called something else [2]) is still an undefined date target.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=eth+merge+gas+prices
[2] https://blog.ethereum.org/2022/01/24/the-great-eth2-renaming...
Basically any large organization IT project, defense project or anything which a politician touches after the sign off, then.
Except there are no regulations around it or legally-binding contracts to protect these projects and we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars lost with little to no way for compensation or any legal case. Not even suing the creators would do anything for those losses.
Since Crypto is still a wild-west, projects like Ethereum are free to mislead their investors into loses and when they did eventually lose millions over a hack, suing them was futile. So the creators reversed the entire chain, defeating the whole point of immutability of Ethereum.
It's been more than 5 years since the move to PoS was expected for 2016. Everyone knows how both expensive, slow and inefficient Ethereum still is today for anything on-chain and even some have given up waiting on this sunken cost contraption to improve and looked else where.