But one thing is o/c right in this whole mess. Proof of Work can't be Bitcoins destination.
It is. It always has been. It was the intention from the beginning. It always will be. Get over it.
If you don't like it, there are thousands of shitcoins for you to choose from.
First of all one question is if it really still fulfills its function for decentralization.
Decentralization has nothing to do with it. Decentralization means nobody can stop you from creating a wallet and connecting to the system. Whether consensus rules change or not is determined by the consensus of the users, not by some authority.
Is a system truly decentralized or distributed when there is already just a handful of groups that would just need to agree on common terms?
it seems you misunderstand the basics. The only way to change any consensus rule is for ALL users to agree.
Energy might be another factor and important as well, so a less power hungry solution might be great,
And just how much energy does the world's leading alternative consume?? The energy FUD is a bunch of nonsense.
on the other side it could be very healthy to the renewables industry if all miners would be forced to use only green energy, since this would generate a significant amount of money flowing into those industries. But I don't see any technical way to really enforce that.
No. Because.... It's decentralized. There is no authority that gets to decide. You want to force mining onto renewables? Make renewables cheaper. Mining is driven by profit, it will tend towards the cheapest electricity.
I am a long-term user since Bitcoins inception, but I stopped following the development for some years now and hold most of my assets I bought for a few cents years ago and just do some trading from time to time. So I might be not up to date if there are efforts to move away from PoW.
There are not. There will never be.
If Bitcoin is not considering to move and evolve,
Bitcoin moves and evolves all the time, but it's not going to adopt nonsense just because some people said made up some scary things on the T.V. (or twitter)