Have Purism solved the problem where it will randomly burn through an entire battery charge in an hour?

That basically makes it a non-option for the overwhelming majority of people, and it was still an issue 6 months ago.

I really want to like the Librem but it's hard to justify the price tag when you're going to have to carry another phone around with you anyway.

I use a Librem 5 as my daily driver without carrying a second phone around.

The battery thing is not an issue for me in practice. I carry a spare battery (they're swappable), but I never actually need it because there's USB-C chargers everywhere I go, and I made it a habit to plug it in whenever I can.

Look, no offense but it sounds like the battery thing is an issue for you in practice, as evidenced by the fact that you carry a spare battery and plug it into a charger multiple times per day.

A phone should adapt to your lifestyle. You should not have to adapt your lifestyle to your phone.

Linux phones can't benefit from 10 years of software optimizations for the battery life, so yes. However it's good enough for non-heavy usage already.

I don't have such issue. The battery is sufficient for one day unless I use the phone heavily.

Edit: Actually it did happen when I opened a Firefox tab with a heavy js and left it open with deactivated suspend, which you shouldn't do on any phone (and even then it's more than a couple of hours).