It does this since macOS Catalina and it drives me up the wall. Since it’s spending all that processing power on redrawing the stupid table view I just keep it hidden until I need it.
I also wondered what this is. Is NSTableView that resource intensive? I've had good experience with it on my own projects with it redrawing quite a lot of items but I'm not a macOS developer so I don't know it too deeply.
No, there’s just something wrong with what Activity Monitor is doing. It was fine the release before and since Catalina the list is really bad it doesn’t do column sizing right either.