It sounds like just a nitpick to me. The networks exists to process transactions. It's only fair to count its total energy consumptions to see how efficient it

It sounds like just a nitpick to me. The networks exists to process transactions. It's only fair to count its total energy consumptions to see how efficient it is. That it does a lot empty work without processing anything is a by product of a bad design. If it's mainly about minting new coins and once it's done the energy usage goes down then we could just skip the step, you know?