> The underlying technology is valuable
Is it though? Valuable how? Has it been proven?
The core of the issue is that PoW is fundamentally a sort of algorithmic cancer that threatens to basically take over on the order of half of the worlds computational power to fuel worthless speculative trading. IMO there's an important argument to be had that trading on PoW blockchains should be outright banned. Yes, you can't get rid of it completely, but you can get the impact down to a manageable level.. like with cancers.
And yeah, then you have PoS and PoA blockchains. But it's yet to be proven that PoS provides the same level of security as PoW, and there's solid arguments that it never possibly could. PoA is fundamentally different from PoW and PoS, so you can argue whether it's even the same underlying thing. It's no longer truly decentralized. I think it could be very useful. It's just not as sexy and susceptible to fueling pyramid schemes, so it's less popular.
So to me it seems like we really don't know at all yet if the "underlying technology" is even providing a net positive value to society.
If the "underlying technology" here is trustless distributed blockchains (that is, PoA doesn't really apply), then I think there's an argument that the core of the idea is fundamentally broken. There is perhaps no such thing as a truly trustless system (for PoW/PoS blockchain, you're just converging on concentrating de-facto trust with a small clique of trading platforms and mining/wallet app developers), so maybe it's better to just be more explicit about where we're placing our trust (through solid cryptography if we can) and to make sure that those entities are democratic institutions worthy of our trust. But this quickly becomes a very deep and philosophical argument, so it's outside the scope of this comment.
I support further research and development into blockchain-related technology, I certainly think it could be truly valuable. But it's yet to be proven IMO.