I struggled to get through the top half of this post, which is about various Thinkpad model types that the author had. But the second part, where the author explains the various sleep modes and what it means, was very informative & worth a read!

I've personally always solved this problem by enabling "Hibernate" (not sure if that's a Windows-specific term) which writes the entire RAM contents to a file and then shuts down completely. The downside is that it takes a few seconds to boot (impressively few seconds on a modern machine, actually), but still, the laptop doesn't come on instantly. But I like knowing that there's no chance the laptop somehow turns on and overheats/drains in the backpack, because it's completely off.

This doesn't take away from the author's rant at all, the idea that a sleep mode would need to support notifications or updates (!) is absurd. A good sleep mode would need to only support "minimum power usage" and "fast wake-up" and nothing else. But with MS's usual mix of excellence and absurd stupidity, that appears to not exist, and "hibernate" is to me an acceptable compromise. My understanding is that Macbooks have gotten this right for decades already, pretty nuts that PCs lag behind so much.