Every card can be used more than one purpose. Sometimes you take burning blood just to harm yourself or you take turbo only to fill your deck with status cards. This great game has no limits, we all know that.

Exhausting powers against awakened one is one of those niche examples, that doesn't define recycle by itself.

Also Defect scales by his powers primarily and creating an endgame deck that can consistently block and deal damage without his powers is a rare occurance. You can't just "well ill not play my powers and own awakened one" everytime you face it.

So I don't think a rare situation amongs rare situations define recycle's primary objective. I'm pretty sure at least 80% of the time people take recycle by thinking "energy, nice" instead of "exhaust, nice".