> But it definitely is a better option than sleep.

It's the better option if you don't mind the longer time waking up, since RAM has to be restored from disk.

Otherwise, sleep should be backed by hibernation on all machines (it certainly is on mac laptops, and I think it is on windows as well): in case of power loss during sleep, the machine falls back to waking from hibernation, but if there was no power loss it wakes way faster. This is especially useful for people who move around a lot during the day and will close the laptop, move around, and reopen it. While things have gotten better with modern SSDs, having to restore 16 to 32GB from disk to RAM is far from instant-on.