I think you've answered that yourself. If you are putting more work into moving unit of charge, then that unit of charge is going to move faster (all else being constant). Current is the flow electric charge across a surface at specific rate (1 ampere = 1 coulomb per second) and hence - more voltage, more work, faster flow (rate), higher current.
The I-V characteristics of materials and devices should always be measured at the same thermodynamic conditions, i.e. at the same temperature. Mixing the actual isothermal I-V characteristic with the temperature dependence doesn't lead to any useful data for the purposes of physics (but it is occasionally done in electrical engineering and electronics design for certain parts like NTC heaters and breakers).
A pure semiconductor at a constant temperature would be a pretty good Ohmic conductor, i.e. the current will be proportional to the applied voltage. This is a lot harder to measure properly on semiconductors than on metals, though, because of junctions formed with the metal wires that one has to attach for the measurement.
The conduction characteristics of semiconductor devices with one or multiple different materials forming junctions, on the other hand, is highly non-linear and can be made very complex. These devices will also have a temperature dependence, but it can be tuned very finely with appropriate material combinations and geometries.
Pure metals have typically increasing resistance with increasing temperature, but alloys can be made that have almost constant temperature characteristic (i.e. they are both Ohmic and temperature independent). One can also make metal alloys with negative characteristics, if necessary. Both constant and negative temperature characteristic is of enormous importance for the design of electronics, almost none of which would function properly if we couldn't make these near zero-TC metal alloys for resistors and NTC's for temperature measurement and compensation.
Non-metallic materials with very strong negative temperature characteristics often use percolation phenomena, i.e. on grain boundaries in sintered crystal powders, where conduction can only happen in very few narrow points in the material. As the material expands, these points of contact may get lost and the resistance may increase by many orders of magnitude over the technical temperature range of the material. The physics of these systems is very different from that of metals and semiconductors.
I think it would be better to say that power lines are designed to avoid ohmic heating rather than that they make use of it. I am not sure about the potential advantages of the heating for lines that may otherwise be weighed down and damaged or destroyed by snow and ice in cold climates, though. One would have to look at the design requirements for these power systems to understand if their designers make explicit use of these otherwise unwanted losses.
You are correct that one can trade current for voltage and vice versa by adjusting the resistance in circuits. Much of electronics design is a repeated application of that principle.
As for the question of how to design materials that have nearly temperature independent characteristics, that would require a very deep dive into solid state physics and materials research and I will leave that to someone who actually has the necessary detail knowledge. The guiding principle in many of these practical applications is that one tries to offset a positive gradient of one material with the negative gradient of another or one tries to combine multiple materials in such a way that the physical effects (like the formation of defects in the mixed material) offset bulk effects like the increase in the number of conduction band electrons in either of the constituents.
Best Answer
The reason for restricting temperature change is that some materials exhibit a change in resistity when the temperature changes. If the resistivity is constant versus temperature the resistance won't change. In that case, there is no need to restrict the temperature.
A resistor is
ohmicif it exhibits a constant slope V vs I curve. That resistor obeys Ohm's Law.A light bulb filament won't obey Ohm's Law for a set of different DC voltages. But, for a moderate frequency (60 Hz) AC voltage, it will behave ohmically because the temperature, and hence, resistance, will stabilize at an equilibrium value. If the frequency drops to 1 Hz, the V vs I curve exhibits a lot of hysteresis and the V vs I slope can actually be negative due to the temperature fluctuations in the wire as it heats and cools in response to the slowly changing current.