It does use ‘more’ but do not get hung up on mainstream full power desktop processor reviews. They publish stats flat out no stops because they want performance metrics.
NUCs run on what are basically laptop class cpus that offer way better power consumption than thier desktop counterparts and have amazing performance for the price. It’s just in the pre-pandemic economy the Rpi kicked the snot out of them from a price standpoint. Now that the RPis are hard enough to find as to basically be a unicorn and stupid expensive when you do… The NUCs are a great option. If I were building right now for HA it would be a NUC with 8GB of ram and a nice fat SSD.