Is 128-bit security still considered strong in 2020, within the context of both ECC Asym & Sym ciphers Given that much of our ECC crypto primitives provide “only” 128-bit security when defined over a 256-bit curve due to pollard-rho, is it then still safe in 2020 to consider 128-bit security safe for the medium term (5-8 years). 

I’m looking for an answer from an energy/thermodynamic POV given advances in current lithography and GPUs, rather than with regard to a specific cipher, however for discussion I consider AES-GCM or Salsa20 as example symmetric ciphers I use with 128-bit keys. 

Bruce Schneier speaks of AES-128 in Cryptographic Engineering as if it’s already broken!
I strongly disagree with saying that AES-128 is broken, in any way, shape or form, and likewise ECC with 256-bit keys. Note that even in this answer by @kelaka regarding AES-128, you would need over 34 million years of the entire bitcoin mining power to carry out a computation of $2^{128}$. This is far from broken. If quantum computers ever happen at scale, it is very very unclear how long it would have to actually run to achieve $2^{64}$ quantum computations for AES-128 (but ECC-256 would be in bigger trouble). Bottom line, these are far from broken. (I don't know what Schneier quote you are referring to, but anyway I completely disagree.)