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Oh, but it could be improved. Linux can cold boot under 300ms (easier if you control the BIOS and can tune it for speed, like coreboot can), faster if resuming from RAM. That should allow you to perform load-balancing while powering off the extra capacity (using wake-on-lan).
If load becomes too important for the SBC or close to capacity, wake the server, and perform a handover once it's up. You can either hold the packets and use the SBC as a proxy, or change your router's config to point to the newly awakened server (alternatively, just exchange IP or MAC addresses). With a bit of magic to avoid closing existing connections (I believe home ISP routers should keep NAT connections open if a port forward is changed), it would work. Obviously it's even easier with a proper load balancer.
There seems to be surprisingly little interest in this (closest I found was https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/89271 ).
So yeah, it's still wasted power and computation in my opinion. "Ready and waiting" should not take 100W per server, but be closer to 0.1W (WoL), or lower if managing state from a central node. I guess it's not worth optimizing for most people, and big cloud probably does something similar already.
In a way, it's a bit like big.LITTLE with additional latency: small, power-efficient vs big, fast, inefficient for small loads.
Apparently the mix-blend-mode for images on the client is noticable performance-wise: https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/issues/6