TLDR - your body compensates by using less energy in all other activities if you do aerobic exercise, more so if you cut back on calories in. This appears not to happen with weightlifting. They directly measured energy burned with doubly labeled water.

It sucks that losing weight is just impossible unless you change every habit you have instantly and totally and sustain that for the rest of your life. Otherwise your body will balance out anything you ever try to do in a way that makes it totally ineffective.

This is just my own observations, but I find that when cutting calories I need to really optimize the rest of my life to avoid crashing in energy. Sleeping well, no alcohol, plenty of caffeine, lots of water and electrolytes, and time my carb intake. Doing a simple deficient will usually either not work, or lead to my energy completely crashing.