What I'm wondering for a while now: How do the game streaming services run the Denuvo titles? Do they get special builds? They will not run on bare metal hardware but in some kind of VM right? Wouldn't Denuvo detect that and stop working?
Battery life is a weird way to compare these technologies. It does not matter if you dispatch your draw calls or the retained mode framework does it for you - if you have new data to draw every frame then _somebody_ has to do it.
I do ship an IM GUI application to a small group of users and they will not know or care, as long as it does the job it needs to do. What made me choose this approach: I do not need another language/technology for my UI. Composition of the UI is done like I compose code: using functions/objects. I could see this approach failing on bigger projects or when you would have a dedicated designer doing the UI/UX stuff. As long as only programmers are working on the project I think it's fine and quite easy to understand for others what's going on in the 'UI code'.