As far as I understood the Ryzen 9000 CPUs were also disappointing in actual benchmarks at about the same performance for gaming as last generation for a much higher price. I've gone for a good old 7800X3D in a recent build.
at much lower power consumption! Every time a new processor comes around, lots of people complain that they don't need faster but want less heat and less noise. Now they get it and still complain.
It's a much better release than many of the Intel refreshes, but the marketing leading up to it was quite bizarre compared to launch performance.
Moving the same performance down ~40w is great. Having better branch prediction, more registers, lower latency on many ops and double the SIMD width for no cost? Fantastic.
They sold it as a huge gaming gain that hasn't materialized, and then tried to say it was due to windows admin modes interfering with branch prediction (True, but equally seems to apply to Zen3/4)
If they'd sold this as a perf/W and backend architecture shift, they wouldn't be getting the reaction they're currently earning.