The MSP430 is just the chip I happen to use at work, if you’re not convinced you could try looking for an actual ultra low power chip, I found the STM32U0 at 70uA/MHz and the STM32U5 at 16uA/MHz in the first result.

Even ignoring selecting a more efficient micro, a smattering of tiny ceramic caps will buy you a few hundred microjoules for bursts. If you’re already operating at 2V you can get a 6V rated 100uF cap in a 1210 package - and that’s after considering the capacitance drop with DC biasing. Each one of those would buy you 200 microjoules, even just one ought to be plenty to wake up for a few tens of milliseconds every second to get a reading from some onboard peripheral (as an example) then go to sleep again.

For sure, you’re not going to be doing any heavy lifting and external peripherals could be tricky, but there are certainly embedded sensor use cases where this could be sufficient.

It’s more than you think. I work with the MSP430 microcontroller, which is capable of a sleep current of 40nA @ 2V, full active mode at 140uA/MHz with all onboard peripherals turned on. With this you could achieve almost a 20% on-off ratio with a 1MHz clock, or keep it in active mode all the time at ~150kHz, which is sufficient for many embedded sensor applications.

This is basically rule number one in the autocrat’s handbook: Rule something as illegal but make it necessary (e.g. give your public servants a near-zero salary, making them dependent on taking bribes to live). Then at any point the leaders have the legal grounds to arrest whoever they want for ‘corruption’. It’s a very common tactic.