Complete opposite of my experience. Recently had to use my M1 laptop (16GB RAM version, not a Pro or Max chip) for work without being hooked into power and a screen, and I could keep everything I normally do open for an entire day's worth of work and still have plenty of power left over. Which includes a bunch of browser tabs, Slack, a Jetbrains IDE, Typescript compiler watching for changes, backend server, Kubernetes cluster, mysql in a Docker container, Evernote, etc. This would easily turn an Intel MacBook into a jet engine with a battery life of at best 2-3 hours. Maybe Teams still destroys battery life, but I haven't experienced any issues with that even with heavy workloads.
(Replying to PARENT post)