In response to the OP I think the last 2 years alone we have seen a significant change in the mainstream CPU market that has brought about the biggest change since 2007 when we went from single core and dual core to quad core processors, noteably the C2Q and Phenom x4 chips, since their release the CPU market stagnated mainly owing to that AMD was unable to commpete with Intel when it came to raw power and IPC and the mainstream stayed at 4 cores for around 10 years or so until Ryzen changed all this and even Intel was forced to change their respective core counts and classifications (i3 2c/4t - i5 4c - i7 4c/8t) in response to Ryzen in 2017. and I'm not talking about HEDT as that was a different platform, nor am I talking about the AMD FX series that had up to 8 cores, with shared resources. Since then when you couldn't buy an Intel 6 core CPU for anything less than $500 things have changed a lot, and of course now you can get an "true" 8 core CPU for less than that price from both AMD and Intel.
Where does it stop though? I mean AMD have just announced 16c/32t on a mainstream platform, I think the future is going to be multicore more than IPC increases and clock speed, software is and will have to change to accomodate this and that shift is happening, whether or not it will keep going that way until we're at 256c/512t+ CPU's or not, I'm not sure, but raw clock speed and IPC increases of double digits with every generation are long gone so software devs need to adapt, Windows scheduler is already much better at dealing with high core count CPU's and this will only get better over time. Console devs tend to focus on what HW they have at their disposal which is why many games/ports are now able to utilise more than 4 threads and again, this trend will only continue and is not likely to slow down, even GPU's will likely go the MCM way in the future, perhaps at some point core count won't even be taken into consideration and the focus will be on total system performance, kind of like GPU's now with shaders/rops and CU's etc