This feels like a decent place to plug one of my vibe-coded side projects Mac Monitor: https://kristiandupont.github.io/mac-monitor/

I made this mostly because I wanted something to signal to me that the CPU is running wild. With no fan, I often discover this a bit late, so I wanted just a very subtle indicator in the menu bar. I also added a UI in the browser which shows you some details, though nothing near the level of Process Explorer.

I use iStat Menus for this. An excellent series of tools that lets you monitor just about everything that can be monitored on your Mac.

App Tamer will help you keep unruly apps under control, forcing them to run on efficiency cores instead of performance cores, slowing them down if they eat up more than X% of your CPU, stopping them entirely if they are in the background, and so much more.

The combo of iStat Menus and App Tamer is what makes it tolerable for me to have a MacBook Air as the primary laptop I use these days.

I love the menubar UI idea!