Absolutely. For most workloads - even those multithreaded are single thread limited in execution by amdahl law. So for normal even multithreaded desktop use cases 7950x is faster option than 9754 because it's per thread performance is better. That's also reason AMD and Intel doesn't even try to sell consumers 128 core cpus - those would not be best performing parts anyway.
And as most typical workloads today are multithreaded - that MT score that GB6 measures is pretty much best performance comparison man can do when comparing cpu performance. Single thread score is important but today it's even more important to have cpu design which can scale well on executing few threads - and to gain that performance is most difficult for cpu designer. There's no cheap tricks as chiplets to excel in that comparison.
From my experience, there are cases when you need to have as many cores as possible:
1. Running tests in parallel. This type of work scales pretty well with the number of cores, especially on huge projects.
2. Code compilation. The more cores you have, the better, especially on the huge projects. I don't write in C/C++/Flutter and don't see that frequently. But having 2x more performance with 4x more cores is a good result here.
3. Complex projects with a lot of microservices, docker containers, and other stuff. The performance scales pretty well here as well because each container or worker can utilize separate cores.
4. Project indexing. It's not a big problem for small projects, but once they become bigger, it may take more time. It's also scales pretty well, especially on fast SSDs.
5. Build and release tasks. It's related mostly to JS/TS projects built with Webpack, Vite, or other building tools. And they can benefit from multiple cores.
6. Also, there are server-related cases when you have dozens of workers, services, and other stuff, but it's pretty rare to have the production setup running on the developer machine.
In the case of running tests or project indexing, the performance scales similarly to Cinebench R23. It's a good representation of the best-case scenario. Geekbench 6 is a terrible metric here.
Usually, the more time-consuming the task, the higher the chance that it can scale well.
For example, one big company specializing in creating some Java products has a separate 2P server to run tests during the weekend
I have a hard time believing this as the default PL1 for this CPU is 75 watts in balanced mode. It can also go much higher when turbo boost is activated too.
The PL1/PL2 levels depend on the laptop vendor and can be easily changed. In the case of Intel 12900HK, the 45W PL1 is absolutely fine. I was playing with 55-60W, but there's only a small performance improvement. So it's not worth it.
In the case of Dell XPS 17, for example, it is 45W on average, which can be dynamically adjusted between 35 and 55W. PL2 is set to 115W, but the laptop never reaches it. Usually, it's nearly 70-80W for 28 seconds.