I don’t know anyone at work who would agree with this. Docker is fine on macOS, honestly always has been. Sure, it will show up in Activity Monitor, but so will any other software that is actually doing something. I have never seen my CPU peg because of Docker, and I regularly run large stacks, use Earthly for all my builds, etc. The overhead of the VM + containerd is truly not that large.

CPU % in top and similar tools isn't a great proxy for energy usage anyway, it's a lot more complicated than that.

Docker is terrible on Macs, but I used to run Docker+vscode+Firefox+Brave+Slack+misc. I'd run into issues on my 2015 MBP from time to time, but on the 2019 models it was fine.

gulp.watch would often eat an entire core, and stuff in Docker ran slower than on Linux, but my laptop could keep up. vscode didn't lag and Firefox ran just fine—all with 5+ Docker containers running.

I have no idea what you are talking about. I have about 7 containers running the full work app and I can't hear any fan noise and the laptop is running cold.

This thing is running Rails, mysql, elastic search, redis, mongodb, and workers inside docker. As well as nodejs, vscode, a handful of electron apps all at the same time and the laptop is cold.

Not my experience at all, you must have something weird in your setup. For a full dev environment I'm running containers with postgres, cockroachdb, several ruby apps, kafka, some JVM based stuff, and clickhouse and it does hit battery life a bit but certainly not pegging the CPU, actually it's using less than Slack...

Not my experience either on a fanless M1 Air. I can run lots of containers without it perceptibly heating up or slowing down. Battery life does suffer but I can still usually get at least 4-5h of solid programming like this.