According to the directions, doing that a few times is supposed to fix the issue.
(This is why I don’t use AlDente, by the way. I don’t want to be inconvenienced by stuff like this and I haven’t seen any strong evidence that it actually helps with battery health vs. the stuff built into macOS.)
My guess is that AlDente caused this. Have you been following the “IMPORTANT” directions in the documentation?
IMPORTANT: Keeping your battery at a lower percentage, such as under 80%, over weeks without doing full cycles (100%-0%) can result in a disturbed battery calibration. When this happens, your Macbook might turn off with 40-50% left or your battery capacity will drop significantly. However, this is only due to a disturbed battery calibration and not because of a faulty or degraded battery. To avoid this issue, we recommend doing at least one full cycle (0%-100%) every two weeks. Even if your battery calibration gets disturbed, doing 4+ full cycles will recalibrate your battery and the capacity will go up again.
I don’t see any problem here?
Safari doesn’t appear to be using a lot of energy—49.96 is nothing compared to the numbers I’ve seen for Chrome, Arc, etc. which can be in the hundreds or higher.
Also, from the battery graph before you plugged in your laptop, it looks like you lost 20% in about 2.5-3 hours, which is very different from losing 70-80% in 3-4 hours.
The downsides are that (1) you may experience choppy performance if there’s a lot of stuff moving on your screen and (2) some video content won’t play at all because of copy protection.
Unfortunately, because your MacBook (and my MacBook) only supports one external display, there is no way around these limitations if we want to use multiple external displays.
Is the WD19S a DisplayLink dock? I don’t see it mentioned on the product page and Dell’s list of their DisplayLink docks doesn’t list it either (only D1000, D3100, D6000, and UD22):
Unlikely. You could probably get away with an M1 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD.
“I just sold $3000 worth of X” doesn’t really say anything about whether X is a wise purchase.
Does your dock support DisplayLink? Check if it’s on this list: https://www.synaptics.com/products/displaylink-graphics/displaylink-products-list
Your usage sounds light enough that you won’t notice any performance difference.
The processor isn’t the only thing to consider, though. The M2 has a brighter screen, better webcam, and MagSafe charging which can free up an extra port for accessories. I personally feel that those features are worth the price difference.