Maybe a bespoke (mostly) decentralized implementation that requires more power than mid-sized countries isn't worth it; especially if it's throughput is 7 TPS.
You could also say "more power than 3 large US cities" (Los Angeles = 60 TWh/yr, Bitcoin = 180 TWh/yr) and your statement would be equally valid, yet much less impressive. Saying "mid-size country" is about as useful as "mid-size rocks" since mid-sized countries, like mid-sized rocks span 3-4 orders of magnitudes. Fist-sized? Regrigerator-sized? Bus-sized?
Did you know that China curtails more hydropower (200+ TWh/yr [1]) than the global electricity consumption of Bitcoin, than entire "mid-size countries"? China literally spills water through the dams without powering the turbines, because they have a hydropower surplus that they can't redistribute through their national grid. When you start learning things like that, you realize Bitcoin's electricity consumption is, fortunately, still a drop in the bucket compared to the immense waste from, well, everything else humans do on the planet.
