Comment by soulofmischief

I wiped the machine weeks ago, not recently, and I wiped it while debugging the issue, which existed prior to wiping it. I was having these issues on Tahoe on my M5 (came with it, unfortunately), but not Sequoia on my M2 (occasionally things would spike but it always ran cool when idling or doing my normal work). The issues got even worse on Golden Gate. Upgraded my M2 to test and it started exhibiting the same problems.

I also have as much indexing turned off on Spotlight as I can, and that is another issue. Spotlight seems to disrespect my settings and indexes/displays more than it should. Seems like an open, unaddressed bug. I've assumed this is related to the Spotlight-specific CPU usage issues I have but it doesn't explain the others.