I am hoping to catch the eye of someone who has some insight into the mach kernel, as I can't imagine why what amounts to a key press interrupt would result in such system load.
Fairly heavily loaded M1 mac pro (think hundreds of chrome tabs). Activity monitor says it is 80% idle. I was playing a youtube video on chrome (probably not the native version), and noticed that hitting the caps lock key would cause the music to stutter. Opening up activity monitor and hitting the caps lock key repeatedly causes idle percent to drop to 40% and plenty of stuttering.
What gives? If I didn't see it myself, I would not believe it, as I don't recall ever having seen a working system behave like this.