Its sole purpose is to be a global currency you can send from A to B effortlessly and without relying on trusted intermediaries.

Perhaps that was the design goal, but it seems that speculation is also a significant (perhaps the larger) use case. I agree that crypto has been great for international money transfer, but it is far more expensive than traditional banks for domestic transfers. It seems that

it's nonsense framing to not put them in context.

I checked a few of those links, and wasn't completely convinced. It was full of peoples blogs comparing the costs of running all the brick and mortar banks to crypto. Of course, banks provide more services than saving and transferring money. Perhaps a better comparison would be to the energy use per dollar of the EFT system, or to a proof of stake crypto.

On its face, spending a measurable amount of energy guessing random numbers to satisfy an algorithm is wasteful. This is especially problematic since society subsidizes energy costs with the assumption that people will use it to create value.

As far as I can tell, (please let me know if I'm mistaken) mining Bitcoin does not create very much value since marginal increases in mining does not have a commiserate increase in Bitcoin trade efficiency or security. Marginal increases in mining does put money into the pocket of people doing the mining.