This exactly sums up my long term feelings. Even now I’m annoyed by all the background bloat/tasks that are running on it, and I’d prefer being able to have more control over what runs on it for battery/performance reasons. Additionally, even though I’ve had it for years at this point, I think I’d still be more comfortable if I could use i3 with it.

Background processes almost never really use expensive resources on macOS or Linux. Certainly they can cause symptoms sometimes, but it's typically no worse than extra fan noise.

All the wasted resources on most people's machines are going to a) pixel buffers b) browser tabs c) both.