There’s definitely good use for these optimized tools. Especially on old systems with low resources and slow CPU’s.
I generally like the simplicity of suckless tools. dmenu together with i3 is a nice duo.
Suspend to RAM does not work for you?!
What distro do you use and what kernel? What do the files /sys/power/state and /sys/power/mem_sleep contain? Maybe it's just a SystemD issue?
For what it's worth, a comment [0] on the Archlinux BBS says that Linux 5.6.13 fixed the issue for the user's t495 and Debian seems to have 5.6.14, so if you haven't yet tried updating the kernel, definitely try now.
[0] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1905479#p1905479