Iiuc, a tiny clock in the top right corner of the screen will trigger O(n) work where n is the number of elements on the entire screen. On every change of the clock, e.g. every second. This may be more if there are smooth animations, e.g. 25 times per second if that is the animation frame rate.
Sure, but it will consume less CPU than an idle instance of Electron. Or the effort it takes to redraw a React app even once.