Actually, ultra-low power devices (ie months-/years-long battery life) are probably better suited for older technology nodes, say 40+ nm for bulk, or 22+ nm for SoI. Standby leakage power is going to be too high on the lower nodes. Lasting months/years on a coin cell means sub-1 uA standby combined with infrequent, short-lived wake cycles. There's no real way around this until you go to energy harvesting, and right now that's limited to very very low power, single-function devices.
Excellent post -- a rarely understood truth. For low power wireless systems, still, though, the bulk of the energy is spent in TX and RX. But realistically the quiescent power drain still needs to be in the sub 5uW range to deliver long life on a small battery. A lot of GNSS and LTE SoC's standby in the 50uW range, which is just too much. Most of the LTE devices I've surveyed (M1, NB-IoT) are expected to be attached to MCUs, but they implement internally a small linux platform. Obviously, that makes it hard to get down to 5 uW.
