Many Programs are now running in the Background

[PotentPeas]

You shouldn't have to, and you shouldn't. Background processes are a perfectly normal part of any operating system, and in fact, your OS wouldn't work without them. Neither would your apps.

I get that there are some legit cases for background apps. Chrome keeps an update manager running so that your browser can remain up to date even if you don't have it open. That's... OK (but you should still be able to turn it off if you manage app updates with another tool, and they don't make that easy).

I think Adobe pushes the envelope here a little too much. They don't need a "Crash Processor" background process running (and using CPU time!!) if I don't have any Adobe apps open. Just let it finish any job that it has and quit, and run it again if I open another Adobe app.

They also have "Creative Cloud Content Manager" which has used almost 2 days of background CPU time on my system (which currently has an uptime of 11 days). I don't use Creative Cloud for anything other than installing and updating Adobe apps, I don't leave the Creative Cloud program running, I don't have any Creative Cloud file sync enabled. What is it doing?? That's just being wasteful.

I do not have Creative Cloud as "allowed to run background tasks" in macOS settings, so these processes don't start at boot, but they do start if I fire up Photoshop and they don't quit when I close it.

 

[Comfortably Numb]

I get that there are some legit cases for background apps.

It's not just "some". It's actually most of them. The entirety of macOS is a web of interconnected processes, very few of them ever interface with the user. Almost all apps make use of that. Everything your apps do, outside from drawing its UI windows, is done through background processes.

It's how operating systems work. Everything is a process.

I think Adobe pushes the envelope here a little too much.

Adobe is a bitch, I give you that. You would have to go over my dead body to be able to install anything from Adobe on my machines.