I wrote my original comment imprecisely and without caveat because I was under the strong impression that it was well-known and uncontroversial. I'm definitely not the only person that has observed this. This is the first result for me for "safari chrome battery life": https://www.howtogeek.com/273606/the-best-web-browsers-for-s...
I don't see why number of commits would be anything but an extremely weak proxy for estimating power consumption, certainly not anything to cause surprise. A very strange thing to say by a self-described "rationalist". "Optimizations" is a very wide term you've used. Unless you are specifically targeting power consumption, it's quite possible to optimize for speed and markedly increase power consumption.
I don't see why number of commits would be anything but an extremely weak proxy for estimating power consumption, certainly not anything to cause surprise. A very strange thing to say by a self-described "rationalist". "Optimizations" is a very wide term you've used. Unless you are specifically targeting power consumption, it's quite possible to optimize for speed and markedly increase power consumption.