It doesn't seem to me that the author's objection to Las Vegas is that it is an inefficient use of resources. He does mention use of resources, but that isn't the main point of that section. (Italics in the original; boldface added.)

Like, by what standard is building gigantic forty-story-high indoor replicas of Venice, Paris, Rome, Egypt, and Camelot side-by-side, filled with albino tigers, in the middle of the most inhospitable desert in North America, a remotely sane use of our civilization’s limited resources?

And it occurred to me that maybe there is no philosophy on Earth that would endorse the existence of Las Vegas. Even Objectivism, which is usually my go-to philosophy for justifying the excesses of capitalism, at least grounds it in the belief that capitalism improves people’s lives. Henry Ford was virtuous because he allowed lots of otherwise car-less people to obtain cars and so made them better off. What does Vegas do? Promise a bunch of shmucks free money and not give it to them.

Las Vegas doesn’t exist because of some decision to hedonically optimize civilization, it exists because of a quirk in dopaminergic reward circuits, plus the microstructure of an uneven regulatory environment, plus Schelling points. A rational central planner with a god’s-eye-view, contemplating these facts, might have thought “Hm, dopaminergic reward circuits have a quirk where certain tasks with slightly negative risk-benefit ratios get an emotional valence associated with slightly positive risk-benefit ratios, let’s see if we can educate people to beware of that.” People within the system, following the incentives created by these facts, think: “Let’s build a forty-story-high indoor replica of ancient Rome full of albino tigers in the middle of the desert, and so become slightly richer than people who didn’t!”

It isn't just that Vegas pours money into a hole in the desert that could be better used on something that makes people a lot better off. It's that Vegas makes people worse off by exploiting a bug in human cognition. And that the incentive structure of modern capitalism — with a little help from organized crime, historically — drove lots of resources into exploiting this ugly bug.

A self-aware designer of ants would probably want to fix the bug that leads to ant mills, the glitch in trail-following behavior that allows hundreds or thousands of ants to purposelessly walk in a loop until they walk themselves to death. But for an ant, following trails is a good (incentivized) behavior, even though it sometimes gets "exploited" by an ant mill.

The point isn't "Vegas is bad because it's not optimal." It's "Vegas is a negative-sum condition arising from a bug in an economic algorithm implemented cellularly. Reflection allows us to notice that bug, and capitalism gives us the opportunity to exploit it but not to fix it."

Ants aren't smart enough to worry about ant mills. Humans are smart enough to worry about civilization degenerating into negative-sum cognitive-bug-exploiting apparatus.