That's odd wording. Obsessed because I don't want to waste energy, which leads directly to pollution? Or don't want a short battery life on my laptop? Power savings shouldn't be seen as irrelevant geekery.
13% is half the capacity of a single core in a four core processor. My 5 year old 2500k peaks at 120 watts. So 15 watts to render a cursor?
Microsoft needs to stop it with these terrible levels of QC. Its inexcusable.
Your comment is going to be hosted on news.ycombinator.com, replicated through CloudFlare's CDNs, downloaded over and over and spidered by every search engine on the planet, indexed, replicated through all of their worldwide datacenters, backed up onto tape, copied into training sets, and a contender for the result set of every single internet search on every search engine for the rest of eternity or as long as people search with words.
How much energy will that take, all in?
It seems that these days anything that a developer doesn't care about is seen as "irrelevant geekery".