No. The answer is clearly no.
Lets do some quick back of the napkin math to see why...
Discord reports ~150 million monthly active users. Lets assume they're all on all the time.
Lets assume most of these users are hardware that's running in the 50watt range (very high for mobile, high for a laptop, lowish for desktop) - Further lets assume that discord uses ALL of it (and we know this is false - it's likely under 5%).
So we have 150 million machines, using 50 watts. This is ~7500 megawatts of power for discord.
Now we run the same numbers for Slack - we'll keep the hardware estimates the same, but use the latest slack numbers of ~12 million active users.
So we have 12 million machines, using 50 watts. This is ~600 megawatts of power for slack.
So combined, for discord and slack, assuming they use the ENTIRE power budget of the machine they run on, they represent about 8100 Megawatts of power usage.
The best number I can find for bitcoin puts the usage at about 150 terawatt hours a year.
If we take our 8100 megawatts and run it for a year - we get... drumroll: 70.956 terawatt hours of annual consumption.
Or roughly half the power consumption of bitcoin, even when we assume discord and slack are literally consuming the ENTIRE power budget of the machines they're running on, and that they're running literally all the time.
A more realistic guess might be that slack and discord use roughly 1% of the electricity that bitcoin uses. And personally - I think they're providing a boat-load more value for the watts.
Fair caution - All my numbers are back of the envelope, and I did the math quickly and without paper. Feel free to point out if I missed something or dropped a step in a calculation.
All that to say that IMO there is a fairly big incentive to re-think our software stack. Part of the issue is that it is hard to optimize software for all platform/hardware, therefore creating the need for abstraction. I wonder how this would all look if we suddenly stopped developing new hardware and put everyone on the same page, would software slowly become more efficient?
The focus on mobile devices, and battery life in particular, has done a tremendous amount to reduce power consumption.
A typical desktop computer from the 2000s could easily use 1000w. Some of the pentium 4 variants burn through more than 100w alone - not including any of the rest of the hardware in the machine, or the monitor.
A modern laptop will usually come in under 50w - and can usually idle down under 10w.
Servers 20 years ago were mostly big power hungry machines running in closets somewhere - now they're heavily power optimized machines running in AWS/Azure/GCP/Other's data centers.
CPU cycles have gotten ridiculously cheap (both monetarily and in terms of power usage). Single-threaded performance hasn't gotten all that much better.
The market is already optimizing for reducing power usage, because power isn't free and because batteries are a constraining factor in mobile devices.
Also, how many CPU generations would be required to compare to our current hardware with more optimized (or simply less bloated) applications?
I've heard the developer time argument since I started coding in the 90s and have been skeptical of it just as long. I think it's a post hoc justification for practices we already do.
Software development is partly fad and fashion driven, is passed on by imitation, and code is often easier to write than to read. Almost all of the effort has gone towards expanding the numerator in that write/read ratio, and there's neither sufficient incentive to making tools to cut out layers nor widely accepted practices for how that works comparable to those we have for adding layers.
All this adds up to a strong entropic gradient toward software inefficiency, independent of whether or not it actually makes developers more efficient, but leading to a worse experience for users either way. Bucking the trend to make software more efficient can also improve developer time, as Linus Torvalds' argument why it was worthwhile to make git fast. I contend the justification that producing bloated software saves developer time is only true when selectively applied.
My axe to grind here is I question whether we wouldn't have similar improvements if we'd put the similar effort into making better tooling, education, and API design for native (and/or) compiled software ecosystems that we do towards things-that-we-use-because-they-are-there (whether or not they're the best tool for the job in a broader sense).
I have a brand new laptop and I could swear I had much more responsiveness in any other chat app 15 years ago than I have now in MS Teams.
Everything is delayed and "not immediate" while 15 years ago it was in Skype!
How much power is being wasted, CO2 generated globally because of this?
The new generation just assumes that all database/network calls and UI plumbing is magical and free.
I was curious so I checked on my computer. I don't have Discord, but I do have Slack on and use it all the time (calls, screen sharing, the whole shebang). All Slack-related processes in total have used about 0.6% of my total CPU time (a bit of a high estimate because of how that calculation takes into account things like wakeup, but let's go with it). My computer uses probably about 15 watts on average as a high-end estimate. That gets us to about 0.09, say 0.1 watts on average. My computer is on for about half the day, so let's say 0.05 watts.
If we consider Slack's current active user stats (it looks like 10 million?) that gets us 500 kilowatts. It seems like most sources agree that Bitcoin's power usage is probably around 10 gigawatts. So based on Slack's current usage stats I'm guessing there's around 4-5 orders of magnitude in difference between Slack power usage and Bitcoin power usage.
I can join a voice channel seamlessly, talk to my friends, listen to music together, stream my screen, watch others streaming their screen, build custom interactive bots that manage rich media, send messages from my apps to a channel with webhooks which I can create in seconds, see what other people are playing or listening to, reply with custom emotes, create threads, add syntax highlighted code blocks, etc. I could go on for an hour.
None of the old school 1998 irc channels had these capabilities and I'm sick of everyone on HN pretending like it's the same thing. If it was, people would use it.
That's actually the #1 reason to use any of these bloated development environments. And it's also the reason why it's so popular. But I agree, here we are, getting angry at bitcoin because it uses so much energy, but if I would need to guess, could it be that Discord and Slack _alone_ use more energy world-wide than the entire bitcoin network? Those are on 100% of the time on most PCs.