In my humble opinion, it all comes down to the link between energy and value, complex and inexplicable as it may be. Energy may or may not create value, but value requires energy. There is no "free lunch" in this universe.
This is one of those complex, philosophical topics where the answer is "Yes, but..."
Yes to what you stated above.
But...there are so many "things" in this world today that took a lot of energy and manpower to create (and thus had high value when first created), but their value has now fallen to near zero because humans no longer value them. They don't just retain their value long term because they had a high energy input.
This could happen to any "thing" created, because value is also subjective and is applied to "things" by the emotions of human beings.
What you're saying is true. Energy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for something to have value. You could pour a lot of energy into creating something very valuable, and it could then lose its value in the future, or the energy could be wasted straight away (like the
10: GOTO 10 code example). In the first case, one could argue that the object's raw value hasn't actually been lost, but rather, it is not recognized or appreciated by society anymore (and hence could rise up again). On the other hand, energy is almost always needed in order to create something of value. Even in the case of the
10: GOTO 10 code example, if the computer executing the code warms up the home of a poor family, this pointless piece of code would be very valuable to them, equally valuable to any piece of code!
In the end, perhaps everything comes down to converting energy from one form to another. What matters is that the product of this conversion solves a problem, and if it does, the product becomes valuable.