In case you hadn't seen it, there's a rather well-received video called "Line Goes Up - The Problem With NFTs" (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g). It really covers crypto in general and treats NFTs as a crypto offshoot. It's 2 hours long but still feels rushed.
Dan's general attitude is that crypto isn't revolutionary and isn't really trying to be. It's not trying to democratize money. It's trying to build a system with the same power dynamics as the current system, but with different people at the top of that power structure. His take is that crypto doesn't solve any of the problems with the existing systems and just creates a bunch of new ones.
My recollection is that he doesn't spend much time on the energy use (he touches on it but IIRC doesn't dwell on it). He does go deep into the "wild west" state of them. His attitude seems to be "wild west" isn't a transitory phase; it's the end state of crypto.
I don't think he says it in that video, but in a subsequent interview, Dan pointed out a danger with this and all deflationary currencies - they reward early adopters and people with a lot of capital. People who buy in late (either by choice or because they were simply born later) have a compounded difficulty in "catching up". He says he's worried about a future where crypto isn't an option and everybody needs to use it to some extent in day-to-day life. Moms and dads - or toddlers - who didn't "get in early" will be at a significant disadvantage.
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Personally, my main concern is with PoW. It's fine to say that PoS will eventually replace PoW, but that's not the situation right now. PoW is wasteful by design, and that just rubs me the wrong way. It's great that miners tend to use more renewable sources on average than the average utility customer, but they're still using an awful lot of nonrenewable sources as well. I guess I just think about all the other things we could do with that electricity and it seems like such a waste.
My secondary concern is with the hype machine in overdrive. It feels a lot like the dotcom bubble to me - people making all kinds of wild claims about crypto, NFTs, web3.0, etc. Everybody so desperately wants it to be the next big thing because they smell an opportunity to make a buck. But it feels very cart-before-horse to me. It's not clear to me, for the kinds of problems that crypto is trying to solve, that crypto is the best solution to those problems. How many use cases really call for a decentralized, trustless ledger?
This article (https://thecorrespondent.com/655/blockchain-the-amazing-solu...) mentioned a couple of projects that got greenlit due to blockchain hype, yet either don't have anything to do with blockchain or else use blockchain in pointless ways - such as having a small, fixed pool of trusted mining nodes controlled by one entity.