Charging the phone while it is off

[orbital]

Hello,
I've watched a few reviews of the Pinephone and Pinephone Pro on Youtube.
There is a common theme about charging: That the phone has to be powered up while it is charging.
Has anything changed lately in that regard?
I have also noticed that the reviewers complain about battery life, because it seems the OS is unable to tell running apps that the phone is locked or the screen is off. I wonder why it doesn't just decrease the CPU cores' speeds in that case.
Thanks.

[biketool]

I love my pinephone, the everyday driver level of functionality arrived on Mobian just when my previous Linux phone(Nokia N900) stopped working.
The downside is that default starting desktop OS tuning vs mobile tuning leads to bad battery life.
I am sure there is ways to tweak memory, cpu, gpu, and scheduler clock speeds, voltages, and other tricks to get the battery life hacks normalized; we had those hacks for the Maemo 5 OS Nokia N900 and we were able to get at least a day or two out of a much smaller battery.
The PP boots up when USB power is plugged-in but I think(I haven't really tested it) the PP still charges while off if shutdown with a charge cable connected.
Many of the most useful mobile apps are flatpak sourced, it might become an additional task to include a special sleeping setting for mobile apps that are unused during system sleep/standby. I suspect that the worst power waste in my usage case, where I have audiobooks or music running most of the day, is failure to run audio media through a hardware decoder and instead using CPU which can deplete the battery in a few hours.