I also think that the Unix philosophy holds back software that could be good.
IMO the UNIX philosophy is the reason why Linux survived. Imagine if every distro had a single DE, or you had issues with pulseaudio and couldn’t replace it with pipewire.
You shouldn’t prioritize it over good battery life and low overhead.
And why would separating functionality into different tools cause you to have a worse battery life? You don’t get to have tlp on other OS because it’s all integrated