Personal experience: my laptop (older Dell) has gotten so much quieter and cooler since switching over to Linux from Windows. I don't really have anything against Windows, and their WSL2 is pretty great and allowed me to learn the bash command line and run Linux programs in that environment, but the fans were always humming and telemetry was nonstop and massive updates were nonstop (granted I signed up for the Insider Ring thing so perhaps it's not surprising). I actually wonder if I had some crypto-mining malware running or something like that. After wiping the drive, flashing the BIOS and doing a Debian install my computer is almost always cool and quiet and I don't use it any more or less than I did before.

Also while code bloat seems endemic in web development, the embedded world still relies on compact efficient code written in languages like C, so a lot of people are still learning to program in that style, which is a good thing.