Honestly, if it wasn't Chrome, it would be any of a number of other applications finding their way into our daily milieu. One of a dozen Electron based "desktop" apps. Firefox. Eclipse. I can even spin up the processor with VIM, if YCM or Anaconda addons have to do a lot of work.
As developers, we use CPU for work, and we use it hard. A battery in a "pro" laptop should support that need.