If you spend as much time in online games as some people do (it's not rare to find a steam account with thousands of hours in GTA 5), it would absolutely make sense to get a new CPU which will save you 10-15 minutes of waiting time per day.

Also, "perfect storm of bad coding" is the norm for games, and not the exception, no?

well ultimately you buy a new CPU so that your software runs faster

sadly after few years faster CPUs are normalized and we write sloppier code that makes the programs slow again

then amd has to work on next generation of speculative execution innovations and almost AGI branch predictors :) and we go again

Much easier to buy faster CPU than to decompile, debug and fix bottlenecks in games.

When you socialize the benefit with 0 cost to players, that's "easier" still. It's all about perspective.