When were we not in an unhinged race? GHz sells chips, gotta get as many as possible; it's just AMD and Intel have gotten really good at pumping the watts through the chips lately.

But you can buy CPUs with lower power limits, sometimes these are released later in the cycle though, or set the limits yourself. Or probably just leave it at defaults and not usually get up to the crazy high numbers anyway; most desktop use cases aren't going to scale usage so high, although there's plenty of examples that do.