VSCode resulting in massive battery drain, Macbook M2 Pro

I am duplicating this question, because I found an answer to it and it was already closed despite having 50 upvotes.

Original Question: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255527962?login=true

Text is copied below:

Over the past several days, I've noticed that there are two services that are running on my machine that may be significantly impacting my battery usage.

The battery drains almost entirely (from 100% to 0) within about 3-4 hours. There are two potential issues that I can see looking at the Activity Monitor:

1) VSCode - When it's open, whether I'm just editing markdown files or running a development server has a larger impact on Energy than other applications:

2) I've noticed a process called "chrome_crashpad_handler" that is using a significant amount of % CPU comparatively to other services. I'm not sure if this is related:

As far as I'm aware, this hasn't been a problem in the past before this week. My battery health currently says "Normal" with 100% capacity.

Hardware/Software specs:

* Apple M2 Max

* 32gb Memory

* Sonoma 14.2.1

* I purchased this MacBook in October of last year, as a refurbished model with no problems thus far.

I'm wondering if this is a battery issue, or if perhaps there's something that recently updated that might be causing this interaction. Haven't found any other recent postings.

I'll try some other troubleshooting, but if there are any other tips out there I'd greatly appreciate them!