Web3 is the unusual case where it has significant effects offline that affects people other than nerds, namely in the form of energy consumption and global warning.
Christmas lights use 6.6 tWh per year. It's estimated that Bitcoin mining uses about the same amount of electricity as running clothes dryers. I never hear the argument that clothes drying is destroying the world.
It's more than that and growing fast. There's also the yearly upgrades miners go through which shed piles of ASICs and extraneous e-waste which is, itself, constantly growing.
It's using energy fast enough that it's holding us back from green energy deployments. There are studies picking this apart that you can Google if you're interested. The gist of it is that every unit of green energy added to the grid is gobbled up by miners forcing legitimate users of energy to rely on coal. PoW coins have expanded our use of coal over the last 10 years rather than reduced it.
Update:
"But proof of stake..." is green-washing. Claiming that something will be green in the future does not make it green today. Nor does it wash away the fact that this claim has been made for the last 6 years and has been delay yet again. It's release will likely continue to be "some time in the near future," indefinitely.
Web3 is the unusual case where it has significant effects offline that affects people other than nerds, namely in the form of energy consumption and global warning.