Yeah its exaggerated, but that's not the issue here. The issue is what the public perceive to be true. Although, I do think we should probably be focusing on becoming eco friendly somewhat, although I don't think its as big of an issue as its perceived to be. Climate change can be debated from multiple different view points, including natural variation, and while we do know that humans are contributing to the atmosphere by what we are pumping out into the atmosphere, I also believe that's greatly exaggerated on the impact. For example, before humans or at least before the industrial era Bitcoin had a much higher mean temperature.
Anyway, we are going down a rabbit hole there that I would rather avoid, but getting back to the issue that Bitcoin has; what we need to do is change the public perception, as that will help adoption, and more companies like Tesla will be more willing to change their mind. Remember that Tesla will be on the extreme side, since they are a company that is promoting greener cars, and therefore having a technology such as Bitcoin being associated with pollution, isn't a great look on them, and I think it was likely pressure from the stakeholders that they reverted their decision on accepting Bitcoin.
The problem with POW mining is very obvious: Soon it will take whole planet's energy to mine bitcoin if its price to gain another 100 times, that will put a limit on how high the value of bitcoin can become and how fast it can rise
Its currently the best solution we have, despite it being rather resource heavy. Although, I don't necessarily agree with your conclusion. The difficulty of Bitcoin won't always be increasing, and as block rewards are reduced, and eventually removed albeit a very long time, its likely that the amount of users contributing towards the hash rate will significantly drop.