Sad really. I was so passionate about hardware then. I lost interest because the innovation just dropped off a cliff. We were nearly exponential before the Core i series. Interestingly during that period Servers have had many-core CPU's. It just seems that Intel hasn't had a reason to push the envelope on the consumer side.

To be fair, the move started a while back (arguably in 2017 with the introduction of the Ryzen CPUs).

For instance, Steam's hardware report indicates that 1/3 of their install base already has 6 cores or more [1].

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/

That's monopoly power for you. Right now there's competition to Intel again which means processors will probably start getting much faster again.

That's one of the few great things about capitalism - competition drives innovation.