You know what, fair point. I know because my fans go haywire (except that one time my fans decided to just not work until I ran some incantations. The joys of Linux). If you're passively cooled, you get no feedback on CPU load. Makes sense.
Yeah I’m on a MacBook Air, so no fans.
Indeed, that's why apps like iStat Menus, Stats, Sensei etc (for macOS at least) are very useful, I keep the CPU usage and power usage in my menu bar at all times, this is very useful on battery. For example I know that my Macbook Air idles at ~2W-5W, so if I'm doing nothing special and it's using 15W, a process is doing some funny stuff