Ok I'm no master of a cricut by any means, but it is a useful tool for upcycling, and repurposing things which in my eyes can only be a good thing, it can be wasteful if you don't try to reuse as much of the off cuts as possible.
Currently, I have made paper crafts of different types, vinyl as well as HTV. I try to find as much reusable as I can even if the project fails I try to find things that can repurposed from it
I try to keep the parts cut out of the cards we cut for scrap booking, I cut as much of the unused parts of vinyl off of the vinyl and htv as possible so not to waste the product.
See some bits I have made