I remember when I couldn't fly across the country without running out of power due the terrible power usage of VSCode.

One such example was the cursor blinking causing hight cpu usage - https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/22900 I'm assuming they've fixed it?

Electron in general continues to be a bloated memory hog and inefficient. I think the real interesting thing is how good it is despite the runtimes/frameworks they are using, not because of them. It's more an example of there's no such thing as the "right tool".