I think that you are wrong to extrapolate anything about the hardware capabilities based on your experience on a few tasks.
Difference are more software related in my opinion. And it might be just appearance as Apple is used to do tricks. Like for example it was shown in a good old time that people were thinking that the iphone was faster to load things because of using animation at load time despite taking the same time as other phones.
For example, for the many tabs in Chrome, the difference might be that macos is aggressively throttling things when your linux laptop will give you the maximum performance possible and so producing more heat. I often noted that with osx and especially when you don't have a lot of ram. The os will easily put to sleep and evict other programs, but also other windows and other tabs I guess as part of them are separated process. Then, when you need them, it reload the memory. Good in term of power efficiency but in my experience I was experiencing terrible latencies like going from one window to another. Let's say like 1s. Not obvious if you are not used to better.
In the same way that a lot of persons are used to electron based ide like vscode and feels perfectly ok, but for me the latency of typing code and it showing on the screen is awful compared to my native ide.
In the same way for macos, you can see how often the laptop will go to sleep, or lower the display light unexpectedly with default settings. Like these guys that suddenly quit Google meet meetings because the mac went to sleep despite the active call.
Difference are more software related in my opinion. And it might be just appearance as Apple is used to do tricks. Like for example it was shown in a good old time that people were thinking that the iphone was faster to load things because of using animation at load time despite taking the same time as other phones.
For example, for the many tabs in Chrome, the difference might be that macos is aggressively throttling things when your linux laptop will give you the maximum performance possible and so producing more heat. I often noted that with osx and especially when you don't have a lot of ram. The os will easily put to sleep and evict other programs, but also other windows and other tabs I guess as part of them are separated process. Then, when you need them, it reload the memory. Good in term of power efficiency but in my experience I was experiencing terrible latencies like going from one window to another. Let's say like 1s. Not obvious if you are not used to better.
In the same way that a lot of persons are used to electron based ide like vscode and feels perfectly ok, but for me the latency of typing code and it showing on the screen is awful compared to my native ide.
In the same way for macos, you can see how often the laptop will go to sleep, or lower the display light unexpectedly with default settings. Like these guys that suddenly quit Google meet meetings because the mac went to sleep despite the active call.