Conversely, I'm on a Gen 8 X1, and on Silverblue with tlp replacing power-profiles-daemon, I routinely get 8-9 hours. Anecdata and whatnot, but I'm pretty happy with modern linux + modern hardware. That's not to say I wouldn't love to get my hands on an M1 macbook to see the difference though...
Right, and that is the issue. If I buy a Mac and run MacOS I can be sure that I get long battery life. If I get a PC laptop and run Linux, it's a random crapshoot if the random combination of hardware, kernel version, etc. (I also used Silverblue and Fedora) of whether you get a good battery life.
Maybe Asahi Linux will improve things, since they only target a very small number of hardware configurations.