This is highly likely to be Google Meet using CODECs (like VP8/9) where the hardware acceleration is nothing like as well developed (read available or power eff

This is highly likely to be Google Meet using CODECs (like VP8/9) where the hardware acceleration is nothing like as well developed (read available or power efficient) as the h26x series, which Google are resistant to for licensing reasons. They also like doing simulcast, where the burden of encoding different stream resolutions for different end clients is performed at the sender end, when others do this transcoding in the cloud. Edit: Meet also apparently uses MediaPipe, which in browser does results in heavy WASM/GPU usage which on a native API could go to a NN accelerator instead. It is fair to say that stuff can melt batteries too.