I still don't understand how Windows could possibly have become so bad at sleeping. Both desktops and laptops have a tendency to wake up at weird times and then never go to sleep. This stuff used to work. What happened?
I believe, although I'm not 100% sure, that in addition to turning on the computer without the user consent, it also puts the machine in a strange state where it's neither on nor off.
According to the spec: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstantGo, it's allowed to suck up to 7.5% of battery every day. As a matter of fact, my Surface device would lose more than 5% every day, and I'd find odd periods of wakeup in the sleep log (when the machine was supposedly fully shutdown).
Why? So that apps can communicate with the Internet while the machine is in sleep mode, or do periodic wakeups for other reasons. Another attempt to shoehorn the smartphone paradigm into desktops/laptops.
Does S0ix-related heat increase or decrease when laptop is in a faraday bag?
It's less about telemetry etc. (you could do it with age old ACPI timers), it's about people complaining laptop doesn't boot immediately from sleep when they open the lid - but also that on a system where power management support is heavily tested (read: not Linux) "Modern Standby" has less moving parts and is harder to break.
It's truly notoriously bad. I suppose it's designed that way to ensure a game won't black screen, but how hard would it be to make it a bit smarter? Ie when VSCODE or Terminal has focus, allow sleep.