I agree with all your points and also agree that honestly, these scenarios aren't far off from real world tasks.

I get the main issue, which is you could adjust the workload by 10% and achieve a 50% performance loss when you do this at the point where we cross the cache threshold and whatnot.

However I see CPUs unique in that I rank them _for_ these scenarios. A particular might be ranked unfairly, but as long as the test is equal, the better one is infact better, just not by the 50% the test might show but it's still going to be 5% better. I expect my GPU to be idle when it isn't training AI or rendering frames, but for the CPU, it's general purpose in real life, and anything goes.