Network activity is quite significant for battery drain, thats why mobile XMPP clients do this: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0352.html
Mobile push is a combination of brain damage and bizarre propaganda targeting developers.
It's not activity itself but what app does in background in reaction to incoming packets. Clients I used (Bombus and Xabber) didn't support that XEP with no problem. App may just ignore some stanzas when not needed.