Components automatically scale. Disabling Turbo is just silly. Low power mode is silly (unless it’s actually just a script that kills low priority applications.
Energy = Power * Time
If your processor temporarily uses more power over less time then total energy is lower. It’s called “race to the finish” and it’s actually an interesting read.
For those that disable Turboboost, you’re lowering the power but increasing the time it takes to complete tasks, potentially increasing Energy use. To illustrate component scaling, download Intel Power Gadget and observe how during non-use the processor scales all the way down.
tl;dr Can Apple make a low power mode, yes. Should it? No. Should it be better at power management under the hood? Yes.
It seems to me you are implicitly assuming that power and computation speed have a perfectly linear relationship. I don't see how that is possible. Even if the processor clock rate and power consumption have a linear relationship (and I do not know if that is true), there are other factors involved in computation, such as memory and disk access. Since those don't get faster with the turbo clocking, and since they tend to be bottlenecks relative to the processor in any case, I don't think increasing the clock rate is going to give you a linear increase in overall performance. It will just increase the percent of the average compute cycle that you end up waiting for data that isn't in cache. I may have this a little bit wrong, since my knowledge of computer architecture is extremely dated ("OK, Boomer!"