Possibly, but how much time do you need to spend getting closer to the out of the box macOS experience? If it’s more than an hour or so you’re paying more to have an involuntary hobby.

That seems sort of beside the point. The existence of not-power-hungry Linux installs indicates that there’s something Microsoft could do about the problem.

For me, I like a convertible laptop which I cannot buy from Apple for any amount of money as far as I know. If I could have gotten a fully unlocked iPad I probably would have gone for that, but they don’t seem to exist. Yet, at least! Here’s hoping.

It actually would be nice if Microsoft would figure out their part of the mess, because that would give people the ability to trade money for battery life.

That can get it to be okay, if you put some effort in and get lucky with the manufacturer, but it's still worse than basically anything else that's modern and supports Linux.

On my system looking at it right now, I only see wireless consuming much power. Everything else is below 100mW. I can’t really blame x86 for the wireless power consumption (maybe Intel more generally though).