That is unusual. I have never had a laptop that would not work without a battery present.
You have 60W chargers usually for systems with max power draw of the CPU+GPU that can reach around 200W peak and in the mid to high 1XXW sustained if you have a DTR/high-performance “mobile” CPU + dGPU.
Even if your laptop comes with a 90W charger it’s still a problem because it’s not enough to power a 65W series H CPU and a high end GPU that draws another 80-120W.
Most laptops will always use the battery directly and trickle charge it due to the power draw.
Power(hungry)ful modern gaming/DTR style laptops can use both concurrently, heck older gaming laptops used to come with multiple power supplies that were needed simply because even the battery wasn’t enough at the time to serve as a buffer, so you had to plug in 2 power adapters to power the laptop fully.
Even without this constraint having a single power path is cheaper and simpler to design so most manufacturers just only draw from the battery and have a separate charging circuit that charges it without having to add power balancing and switching circuitry.
IBM thinkpads used to advertise that you can switch the battery while the laptop was plugged into the charger most laptops of that period didn’t support this either.
If you go even further it was even more of a headache because older laptops used LiPo batteries which were even more finicky.
Some curious digging found two examples (with pictures):
https://www.gamersnexus.net/news-pc/2612-why-2-power-adapter...
https://hothardware.com/reviews/dell-alienware-area-51m-revi...
Also one of their older W models that will only run on battery if a standard 90W power supply is connected and will only charge the battery if the device is off. Running on external power is only supported with the 135W or (stock) 170W PSU.
I wouldn't doubt it's possible to draw more power than the adapter can give you if you're pushing the MBP full-bore, but I'm pretty sure that under normal power loads, this doesn't happen.
My 16” shipped with a 96 watt charger, and I’ve not seen a laptop with a higher powered one. I’d have to contend with that assertion.
<100W adapters were mostly for potato laptops, until USB-C came into picture which supported up to 100W and now manfucaturers adapted (and probably wait for 200W PD).
I must say that I love that I just plug out the laptop power adapter and plug it into my phone (or mouse) and it charges. Even when it comes with lower performance of the laptop.
I've also had it happen a few times when running unit tests for a different project in Docker, but that's likely just because Docker for Mac makes Electron look resource efficient.
I was rudely surprised by my first Core 2-era machine that wouldn't boot without a battery installed, because prior to that, from Pentium-based Toughbooks back to the 486-based Noteflex back to various 8088 and even pre-x86 machines (PC8201A, club100 represent!), they were all absolutely fine running from the power inlet alone with no battery.
The Zenith MiniSport was the sole exception because the power jack was actually physically on the battery, but you could still gut an old dead battery and make a dummy, and it would run from the brick just fine. (This is documented in the very first issue of Brian Mork's excellent Minisport Laptop Hacker zine, available wherever fine textfiles are sold.)