"Modern Standby" is something that makes your laptop act like a phone. In my view, its only real purpose is to plausibly collect sensor data—just like a phone, or like all those "smart" speakers and "smart" TVs. The data itself has potential buyers and interested parties; it's a well-developed industry chain, and it's even subsidized by users paying for the devices themselves.

My macbook would do something similar. It didn't get as hot, but if I left the wrong program open (Outlook), the battery would be around 5% when I took it out of the bag. If I made sure to close everything, sleep was pretty efficient. That was many years ago, maybe things got better.

Yes, that is so true. Sleep should mean sleep with both eyes closed! not nightwatch.

But Windows isn't the only one to blame. Macbooks do the same (they're less bad because they boot so fast, turning them off completely isn't that painful).

15 years ago the intel apple computers were using timer interrupts to wake up at night and do god knows what.

I know because that machine was loud so I got woken up whenever it was doing that.

Microsoft of course decided that they had to copy this stupid decision, but using a timer interrupt to wake up and then sleep again was too easy, so now we have modern standby which means I must shut down my machine if I am not sure when I'll use it again, because the battery drains fast.

Lol sure. Macs do wake up and connect to the network when they are "sleeping". In fact that's where microsoft copied the idea from.