I am always paranoid about values. If I have to leave, I start stressing about it 2 hours before I need to go. The same stress can be applied to battery percentage. And as someone who starts panicking when their battery goes under 50 and considers 40% as low battery, I feel like the low power mode feature on iOS devices was only made to have a low power mode, so you feel better.
Okay, first of all, low power mode does do some things that aren't changing the battery icon to orange. It disables background app refresh, makes the screen slightly darker, sets the screen timeout to 30 seconds, and stops your email from being updated. But these are all things the operating system can do quite efficiently already, so enabling this doesn't really do much. I know on the newer phones, it disables the always on display and maybe lowers the refresh rate, but I don't have one of those phones, so that might as well not exist.
This is crazy to me because on Android, low power mode was so much different. It made the phone noticeably slower and darker, removed a lot of animations, and on my old Samsung, even made the screen black and white. It noticeably made the phone worse, which is actually good, because that way you know you're saving battery.
iOS used to disable some effects when you were in low power mode, the effect for suggested words on the keyboard, the parallax effect, and the lighting effect when you tilted your phone on wallet all come to mind, but it seems like this is no longer the case. And, yes, modern phones are more efficient, so they don't need to be doing all that to save battery anymore, but it at least made you feel like something was happening.
We need to bring back power saving modes that actually did stuff. The old ultra power saver modes gave you less functionality than a feature phone, but they probably worked. I mean, it said I would get a whole weeks worth of battery using it, why shouldn't I trust it?