You speak of bypassing the switch...

I'm not talking about a short circuit in which some part of the wiring is skipped.

In a device that is always plugged in, power waits at the switch until it gets turned on. The switch itself is just an on-off gate. Once the gate is open, power proceeds to the circuitry and whatever features are built into the electronics do their thing.

Seems to me that this feature would not be a function of the switch, so leaving it in an ON position wouldn't change the flow of electricity at all. Any buffering would still be there, happening after the power got past the switch.

And even if it IS built into the switch... the power will still pass through the switch, so... what changed?