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If every Bitcoin transaction included a fee equal to the energy and amortized hardware cost required to complete, verify, and record it, I'm not convinced Bitcoin would be any cheaper than conventional banking with all its political, regulatory, and personnel overhead.

from http://adamierymenko.com/decentralization.html

I think this reasoning (that is, doubting PoW value like that) is wrong. The problem of "conventional banking" is not in said overhead.
It's wrong to compare an average bank electricity consumption, plus it's workers salary with Bitcoin/PoW alts consumption.
Fractional reserve banking is setting the rules for economy and politics that benefit bankers, and damages everyone in the course of that.
Fiat money exist as debt, so whoever has better "credit rating" can go deeper into debt and benefit from inflation, or from devaluation of his currency towards the reserve currency, currently USD.
So called credit rating is under gross manipulation by powerful interests. This leads to the clusterfucks like in 2008.

Also, debt pays interest, and here we have more manipulation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_repression

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"policies that result in savers earning returns below the rate of inflation" in order to allow banks to "provide cheap loans to companies and governments, reducing the burden of repayments"

This siphons money from workers who hold deposits or bonds (e.g. indirectly in pension funds) to the shareholders, who are already rich.

Conventional banking costs humanity much more than meets the eye.

So no, we are not "paying" for PoW factual electricity/equipment amortization more than Bitcoin deserves (that is, spending electricity that could be used to make fresh water out of oceans and for other worthy purposes). We pay exactly as much, taking into account both the real promise and all the hype, which might turn out to be true in the end. PoW draws as much electricity as free market allows, with admittedly some regulation in some places getting in the way.

To illustrate my point, let's go to Western Hemisphere before Columbus.
There were tribes who used cocoa seeds as money, those who used shells of a certain river mollusc as money, and tribes who used a novel form of money, woven baskets.
A physicalist would argue that only cocoa can be money, as you can consume it also as non-money.
When a tribe wants to switch from shells (the phrase to "shell out" is from exactly this history) to woven baskets, some people may argue:
But shells require so much less labour! You just go to specific river and harvest them.

The problem is, the specific specie of shells that is deemed "money" grows on specific river, controlled by specific tribe, in full analogy with banksters.
Whereas PoW baskets can be woven by anyone with free time and necessary skills.