I guess that the main difference then is that I have to wait less to boot my machine. Did you consider hibernation? It would be a bit slower than sand-by, but then it would draw exactly zero power.
The startup/shutdown time is possibly explained by being an 2013 machine, but I have little reason to replace it right now - it’s only 8GB, old slow CPU (by modern standards), old slow SSD - but it does Firefox, thunderbird, the occasional Python script and a few more things perfectly well.
I’ll replace it when it breaks.
With respect to power draw - there is no simple way to force hibernation on Catalina AFAIK, but the power draw in sleep is minuscule - it hardly registers on my wattmeter (and e.g. it loses only 2-3% percent per day of battery while sleeping).
