You might want to confirm that it is indeed zypper packages before you rearrange too much: Disk Usage Analysis on the desktop, or du -sch * on the console will get you some numbers by directory. It could also be cached packages, clean them up with zypper clean --all.

I’m not sure about specifying different destination directories with zypper, but you could try installing something like vscode from Flatpak rather than zypper, and specifying --user so it goes into your home directory (if that’s a different partition).

I’d also look at your containers with podman and clean up any old ones, they can take up a lot of space.

I have Ubuntu 22.04 on a Dell XPS Plus 13 with OLED display. Looks great, battery life is good. Not sure how tuned the drivers are etc but definitely no need to avoid.