I foresee two possibilities.
1: Coming face to face with their own mistake might put them into shock and they would simply pass out. 2: The realization could create a time paradox, the result of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the spacetime continuum and destroy the entire universe! Granted, that's a worst-case scenario. The destruction might in fact be very localized, limited to merely our own galaxy.
I think baseline Linux is much less CPU and memory intensive (that is before you start running your own user stuff).
If I just leave normal apps running in the background I rarely hear my fans spin up on Linux. But on Windows, I can just boot it, login and then randomly the fans spin up and CPU usage in double digits. Why?
I would agree probably if we ran teams on Linux it would be a resource hog. But you know for work I setup MS SQL server on Linux, and you know even though so far as I can tell they're doing more work on Linux to run it there, it seems to run faster and take less resources on Linux. That is subjective though, since I cannot tell if the usage level on the Linux SQL is comparable to the windows one. But from my limited uses it's definitely lower.
If you start with the OS eating your memory and cycles, there's less for the bloatware you have on a corporate machine to burn.