It really depends on what sort of DAW work you're doing, but you'd be surprised.

I've always found Audio and MIDI processing on a Mac to be a lot more responsive and a lot more resource-efficient on MacOS than any other OS. It's the reason a lot of us ran Hackintoshes back in the day.

For what it's worth, my M3 MBP with 18GB RAM can have dozens of Firefox tabs, virtual machines (some x64, some ARM), editors, terminals, Mail, and Excel open, and you literally couldn't tell it wasn't idling. I've never even heard the fan ramp up.