It feels wasteful to you because it seems that for you the two most important functions of money are medium of exchange and measure of value, in that order. You don't seem to focus on the store of value aspect of it as much.
And yes, there is a speculative self-reinforcing FOMO going on in BTC and probably will be going far into the future. That's how BTC can become a store of value.
It's interesting to think what Satoshi thought (whether Satoshi was an individual or a group). In the Bitcoin white paper he talks about an electronic cash system, i.e. a currency.
Bitcoin does not need to scale in order to be an effective store of value. To be a widely adopted currency, it has to, though. Gold is a good store of value but a bad currency, too.
There are such incredible similarities between gold and crypto, I doubt he/ they didn't plan at least some of this deliberately - 21 million BTC but down to 8 decimals, scarce enough but not too scarce, a declining mining rate with increasing difficulty, right down to the 'mythology' - gold has that too, so does BTC.
It all may be coincidence of course, but if it is design it's even more clever than just the pure cryptography.
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Oh yes, whoever designed Bitcoin had a firm understanding of market psychology and game theory, that's for sure.