I've used Budgie and Plasma on my laptop. It had terrible battery life on windows too, 3-4 hours (can't expect much out of a sub $500 laptop). It gets about the same on each, and it's actually the same for light use, about 4 hours. FOB, it was around 2-2.5. I installed TLP, Powertop, and then recently auto-cpufreq to help extend the battery performance.
On start up with my autostart stuff and applets:
Budgie 3% CPU usage, 1.1GiB RAM usage
KDE 3% CPU usage 1.0GiB RAM usage (as of last night's changes I made)
I still use Budgie on my desktops, I prefer the aesthetic of KDE on my laptop. I tried Gnome, but couldn't tell you the specs. I really don't like gnome no matter how much I try. By the time I added all the extensions, it looked a lot like KDE or Budgie and resource usage was really high. Never used Mate, I tried it out once a long time ago on Ubuntu or one of the arch distros. It felt so stuck in the decade between 1998 and 2008 visually that I just couldn't stick with it.