Rather than seeing the energy consumption as a problem, we should see it as a solution. The energy consumption of Bitcoin is its security. If you do away with energy or reduce it, you change the security model.

You can secure the order of transactions with a virtual or physical resource.

Bitcoin chooses the latter and secures the chain as long as the majority of computations are directed at the honest chain. We know computations require energy to execute and because we're doing so many computations (300 exa/s), this consumes a ton of energy (physical resource) that secures our chain.
Here comes the interesting part. If you want to secure yourself from really high energy attacks (e.g. state-level energy attacks), you have no choice but to combat them with higher energy. Thus, Bitcoin consuming energy levels of countries is really the only way to keep it *really* secure from large scale attacks.

You could argue that instead of energy, we can use other resources from the physical world like space and time. Some consensus attempts try to use these, but my intuition is that it can't possibly have the same level of "hardness" or "cost" to it because space doesn't really "move" around and hence there's no work to it. Admittedly, this is very layman view and I never really looked at how exactly they try to achieve this.

Chains like Ethereum secure the order with a virtual resource called a coin. This resource is completely disconnected from the physical world. Some would argue they are connected because we can have physical consequences (e.g. prison time in case of a theft), but this is just our interpretation of it. The resource itself is inherently disconnected from the physical world because it's defined inside this made up system itself. As a consequence, it comes with no real physical cost and no physical constraints. The reason why you may want to have physical constraints is because the world we live in is a system we don't know how to exploit, at least not yet. This means leaders/countries don't have magic knobs to bend the rules and gain an advantage. Physical world is objectively fair, it encodes no assigned ranks or leader positions.