I think the overall point is that for the average user, who doesn't need all those cores or could make good use of them, the M1 may in fact feel / be faster.
For users like you or I, of course we'd see a huge difference, but not everyone is running workloads that need more than 2 or 4 cores.
An average user is going to buy a 5600X or whatever not the 5950X, and the 5600X's single-threaded performance is barely behind the 5950X. You only get a 5950X if you want multi-threaded performance.
I have a theory on why ST perf is always the most important metric for me, and some other folks. When you're waiting for something synchronously, like rendering a webpage, stuff to open, etc. you're usually running a ST load. For stuff that can benefit from multithreading it's usually planned task. So does it make a difference if it takes 4 minutes compared to 3? You will still context switch.
Right now I have ~20 tabs open and a few apps, a workload which is probably similar to the average user. My machine currently has 510 processes running with 2379 threads, though most of them are background. I'd wager core count is more important than ST performance nowadays, especially considering the fact that applications seem to be multicore optimized.
I’d check your activity monitor to see how many of those are sleeping. My suspicion is that most of them probably are, likely to the point where you are using “less than a core” to handle the load.
For users like you or I, of course we'd see a huge difference, but not everyone is running workloads that need more than 2 or 4 cores.
It’s hard to imagine a regular person playing games or editing the family photos or editing the kid's birthday party videos aren't using multiple cores for almost everything they do.
Even browsing the web these days uses multiple cores.
Apple wouldn't have made the investment if people couldn't see and feel real world results.
For users like you or I, of course we'd see a huge difference, but not everyone is running workloads that need more than 2 or 4 cores.