That is true, but it's possible to avoid using those. What you can't avoid using the actual OS itself. Try booting into Yosemite sometime and comparing your computer's idle resource usage to the latest Big Sur and you'll see what I mean: try as I might, I cannot get the computer to use less than 5% CPU usage, while this used to be trivial.
So not sure why you're feeling sympathy when you will have exactly the same performance issues only without the power and efficiency of the M1 SOC.