Your criticism is around the "waste" is entirely based off of that false assumption, and you are complaining the energy being used to mine. Typically what happens is the opposite, as most of that energy on demand would be wasted as literal smoke from powerplants, since the wattage that isn't being demanded has to be removed because it can't be stored. Instead, miners tend to work with powerplants to actually syphon that.

This is utterly false. There is very little waste in bulk energy production from coal, ng, hydro, and nuclear, because aggregate demand is very predictable. The waste comes from the unreliability of solar and wind, when a cloud comes by or a group of turbines are becalmed drops your production.