Actually it does, and is quite measurable via standard tools like netperf. I have done this, but only because I've worked in Finance as a Linux monkey for the previous 9.5-ish years. I specialize in Linux tuning and reading far too much Linux kernel source code. That and big distributed systems.
In fact, modern kernels support this quite extensively and the RHEL7 documentation[1] has great tips on it for someone new to it.
You can tune an interface for max throughput via coalescing[2] on Linux via ethtool -C to change and ethtool -c to view current coalescing. Setting interrupt per packet helps with latency for certain workload types in addition to SO_BUSY_POLL[3] and the global or per-interface busy polling sysctl. However, interrupt per packet can trivially overwhelm CPUs if you don't isolate those cpus using things like isolcpus= on the linux grub commandline or cpu_exclusive=1 in a cpuset. RFS/RSS and NICs with multiple receive queues make this much easier to tune.
It is guaranteed to use more power, but you can do idle=poll[4] on the Linux kernel boot command line to stay in the highest C state and help with network latency.
You don't really always need an interrupt either as apps can DMA directly to and from the NIC <---> Application bypassing the CPU. How do you think RDMA works at a lower level? Finally, Linux "kernel bypass" networking aka 100% userspace tcp/ip stacks can be written to be truly interrupt-less take a look at Mellanox's VMA or Solar Flare's openonload. Heck, the default openonload config is interrupt-less. The more you know :)
