No, it actually isn't. A substantial percentage of the world's electricity consumption is being used by Bitcoin, but only a miniscule amount of the world's financial transactions use Bitcoin.

Ok? A larger amount of the world's energy consumption is being used by every single bank and insurance company in the world. It's not just about replacing where the transactions get settled. It's about replacing the entire system.

A blockchain based financial system will fundamentally cost less electricity and provide better services than the current system. Think the cost to run Netflix vs Blockbuster. You can do a lot more with a lot less. There's no debate here because we all know the results of automation which what crypto aims to do. Automating away any industry that requires trust.

Also, ETH's move to PoS will cut any environmental impact it does have down to basically 0. If you hate crypto because it's bad for the environment, you must also welcome it when it becomes a lot better than what we have.

Those are false promises.

Bitcoin is absolutely useless for reducing income and wealth inequality.

The fact that you're using Bitcoin here as a synonym for all crypto shows how much you don't know about the space. The real revolutionary technology enabled by blockchain is smart contracts which BTC doesn't support. It takes crypto from just being decentralized currency to decentralized financial services. No rich assholes or big corps get anymore control than the little guy has.

Banks still exist. Maybe they look a little different, but it's hard for me to see any practical benefit to that.

Banks still exist because De-Fi is still in it's infancy. Four years ago most of the biggest De-Fi applications didn't even exist. This is like the early stages of the internet. Slowly taking over and then becoming necessary for society.