I wonder how much of that is crowdstrike. At $LASTJOB my Mac was constantly chugging due to some mandated security software. Battery life on that computer was always horrible compared to a personal MB w/o it.
Wherever possible, I send “pkill -STOP” to all those processes, and stall them and thus save battery…
I half wonder if that’s part of the issue with Windows PCs and their battery life. The OS requires so much extra monitoring just to protect itself that it ends up affecting performance and battery life significantly. It wouldn’t be surprising to me if this alone was the major performance boost Macs have over Windows laptops.