I like the articles [1] by Bruce Dawson where he investigates power consumption on his laptop. He also gives some advice about writing power efficient software.
Apple's tooling in Xcode for measuring this for native mobile apps is pretty good, but I imagine it's much harder to optimise for mobile web apps and I don't know of any comparable tooling.
It is possible to do it "the hard way". In 2012/2013 I consulted on power consumption measurement of one communications app where separate measuring jigs were built for iPhone 5. Little bit of custom electronics and automation made wonders -- IIRC the app shipped with 4x lower power consumption than initially measured. There are really no barriers to doing this the same way today for web apps. On platforms where you have a good access to the battery monitor and high res RTC, you may even get along without extra hardware.
For what it's worth, I also seem to have sqlserver installed because of Visual Studio, but I have no SQLEXPRESS process (checked in services.msc). Perhaps they did change how this works by default since 2016/03/08
I'd have to agree. :) Many of these new technologies like electron and node are more RAM hogs than anything else. Sure they boost productivity but you need a really high end laptop with at least 8GB of RAM to run anything smoothly.
C is neither here nor there. Really anything compiling down to the platform code would improve things. Running a browser environment for these applications is just not as efficient. But also the UI tooling outside of web is also not very good. While you're right about productivity, we also just happen to have a large workforce that knows the webstack very well, but not so much QT or UWP or AppKit.
[1] https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2016/03/08/power-wastage-o...