macos – M1 MacBook Pro 16” YouTube and Chrome CPU usage increasing when watching for extended period of time

I have recently started to watch quite a lot of YouTube videos on battery, and would notice that battery will drain faster as I binge watch.

I have noticed the following happening,

In normal circumstances, a 1080p30 video playing with VP9 in Chrome with M1 Pro in Activity Monitor for CPU usage

around 25% Google Chrome Helper (Renderer) and 0% GPU usage
around 40% WindowServer and 30% GPU
around 10% Google Chrome Helper (GPU) and 20% GPU

After a while (1h or so) however, one of the Chrome processes will creep up near 100% CPU and battery consumption / heat significantly increases.

The way to get around it is to terminate the process in the Activity Monitor and everything returns to normal for a bit.

I have tried to switch between ‘Default’ and ‘Enabled’ in flags for various hardware decoding modes but it does not make a different.

Any ideas?