This is more efficient, cheaper, and has lower latency than your solution. It's also way cooler.
Cheaper? Definitely not
Lower latency? Likely, but the difference in latency would be undetectable
Way Cooler? Yeah, I'll give him that one.
Taking that into account, the difference in power drain for our respective computing resources would be dwarfed by the power requirements for the LEDs, such that the difference is near negligable.