Is that because they are “downscaling” (totally made up term, IDK electronics) the energy coming into them?

It's because despite being far more efficient than incandescent they are still only about 30% efficient at producing visible light. The rest is heat, and unlike incandescent an LED does not want to be hot. The device must be cooled or it becomes less efficient and wears out faster. There is no good way to get the heat out of the front of the device because that's the side you are supposed to see, so in practice all the heat is removed from the back, i.e. the part inside the fixture.

Other solutions to this include using much larger devices, but that costs proportionally more and has application issues because people want their light bulbs to act like either line or point sources, not as areal sources. So most lights on the market use a single small LED, unless they are targeted to a buyer demanding high efficiency and long life, like a city streetlight.

Part of it is that but part of it is just heat loss as the other reply mentioned.

If you get an LED strip, the power supply itself can become warm; but even a LED with no voltage changing needed will warm up.

And if you want enclosed rated bulbs there’s not many choices. The GE ones I picked up flicker like crazy.

I've taken to just replacing fixtures instead of trying to make bulbs work with existing, though I'm --> <-- this close to just throwing them all away and going back to kerosene lanterns and some incandescents.

That's what I did and the flickering didn't go away. I don't like the idea of buying fully integrated led fixtures though. Although I might just cave.

The fixtures with separate voltage converters in their own box seem to not flicker - but test before but.