The most basic RFID tags will just send back an ID. The complexity can shoot way up and have all sorts of integrated circuits, mostly around encryption.
I guess it’s more of a semantic argument at this point, but would you not consider a tiny computer (RFID tag) that powers itself solely off of radio waves not a form of energy harvesting?
The best advice I’ve seen online (ok, it was ChatGPT) is that it’s just not worth it to work with such small amounts of electricity, because the equipment required is too expensive and sophisticated (e.g, devices to read the charge of a capacitor without discharging it) to make anything that’s efficient enough to be worthwhile.
I guess ChatGPT has never heard of passive RFID tags? LLMs have some good uses, but they’re not great at a lot of things. You can’t really advance science and engineering by strictly regurgitating scraped text.
There are reasons to grab small amount of electricity from the environment. Why have a battery in a pacemaker if you can generate power via mechanical forces? It really just depends on the use case on how practical and feasible it is.
Any Paradox game. Oxygen Not Included. Factorio. Civilization. Rimworld. Dwarf Fortress. The list goes on.
For me I think it’s about having non-stop and parallel mini problems/puzzles/goals. By the time one task is finished. There’s two more to take its place.