It's not a bunch of baloney. If you have used Nexus 5 post-lollipop you will experience significantly decreased battery life. http://blog.gsmarena.com/benchmarking-android-5-0-lollipop-b... Project volta doesn't mean improved battery life. There are many factors to battery life that are not addressed by Project Volta.
It's a major release with ton of changes - there are going to be bugs. That doesn't mean entire release was useless.
Besides this article isn't about execution quality - it is about where Google's alleged lack of focus is - it said Lollipop was all about Material design focus where as in reality feature focus wise it was a well balanced release.
Since there might be a bunch of Nexus 5 "me too" users reading this. The immediate solution to the memory leaks and battery issues are to reboot into recovery and clear the cache every 2 weeks or so. This is what I've been doing for a month and it hasn't been so bad as before.
Same. Disabling dynamic floating preview (keyboard) also helps. For an extra boost, though it may be a stretch for some, get in dev mode and disable animations.
Agree, I've observed the same for L on Nexus 5, and battery life is not the only problem there, there seems to be a system memory leak that constantly eating up free memory until even the launcher is killed... I had way more free memory, and no leak on JB.
The problem is Google is coupling improvements in performance and battery life on the backend with additional bloat on the frontend with all their design/animation stuff. So we're not actually getting any real gains here.
Is this kind of a glass half empty thing? The dramatically more popular Galaxy S5 saw a significantly improved battery life. If we just include those data points, and average across users of Android, it was a huge net win for users.
This article is clickbait garbage (again a "contributor"), and it allows people to ply their grievances as if they are canonical.