The default is hibernatemode 3 (RAM stays powered on until battery drops below some threshold, so that wake from sleep is very fast).
The version of “hibernate” you want is mode 25: sudo pmset -a hibernate mode 25
If you routinely keep your computer 'hibernating' for days at a time without plugging it in, you’ll save some battery life this way at the expense of a slower wake-up time because RAM is not kept powered.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pmset for more details.
> Safari is optimized for power consumption relative to Chrome and Firefox
This is a very big difference. Chrome has zero respect for battery life.
Also, you can set the power manager's hibernatemode to your liking (Google search "os x hibernate mode") but there usually no reason to adjust the default (sleep for 3-4 hours, then suspend to disk) given how fast storage is in macs these days.
Macs have been famous for decades for having the best sleep/hibernate functions in the industry and when yours didn't work properly maybe you should have investigated? Or at least not be whinging about Apple over it?
I did / have on multiple devices.
You know what Windows and Linux offer that Mac doesn't? A friggin' Hibernate option. Please, just let me have a button to power off my computer while persisting its state to disk. No, I don't want to have to shut down my computer every time I put it in a bag, that's completely ridiculous and an utter waste of my time having to reset all my tmux panes, vim windows, shell histories... what a UX nightmare. They've made a laptop that's a terror to actually take anywhere with you. Even when the "smart" sleep does (sometimes) finally decide to kick in, it invariably costs 20% of the battery.
When people say that Macs have good power management, what they mean is that Safari is optimized for power consumption relative to Chrome and Firefox.