Or it's the exact opposite. Games are being developed on eight core machines that share the same architecture as PC for the first time. The "cherry picking" as you call it all newer games that have all come out in the last 6-12 months. vs the ones that show the 4 core dominance are mostly from 2015 and a little into early 2016. Which all fits within the development window for the consoles. Most 2014 and 15 games started their life only ever seeing DX11, started life as Xbox360 and PS3 games that shifted focus. While games coming out now are games that lived their whole lives as Xbox One and PS4 games. Heck we already have one game that actually dumbs down the game if it detects 4 cores or less. Intel Coffee Lake isn't coming out with 6 cores because of Ryzen. It's going to be mostly because of a clock cap. But the end point was they couldn't keep the segmentation up much longer. They needed to bring more cores down.
Not saying it will be a "paradise". 4 Cores are going to be viable several years from now. But bit by bit performance is going to erode and that is already happening. Right now its mostly games that run at 80-99% with the 4 cores. Next year it will be more games that are CPU bottlenecked at levels CF, X79-X299, and Ryzen/TR are not. Then a year from that the engines themselves will require much more work from the CPU and you will notice widely different performance between games and the CPU choices. In 4 years expect that 6+ core CPU's are on the recommended list of most games.
Now most of this is the AAA and AA games.
This doesn't mean that people should be tripping over themselves to get a X299 or TR. But this isn't 2011, back then the market was starting to move to more multi-core, but then SB came out and practically doubled performance. OS and software overhead started to take a big dive in resource requirements. Development shifted to consoles even more and then there was the unmoving market segmentation where users were not getting more faster cores from Intel. Now that Intel and AMD have (well Intel will have) Consumer grade CPU's with more cores and even Intel is making their sub 10c stuff more accessible. This is probably going to look more like a leaky damn ready to burst.
Thats not really true, first off, games cant use all 8 cores on consoles, the max they can use is 7, what is an odd number to use.
Second, those are low power/low performance cores, a quad core cpu is more than able to handle more work than those small 7 cores. Hell even a dual core with HT like the G4560 is able to put up a fight.
The limit of consoles cores means they cant load the threads too much, thats what gives quad cores a fighting chance.
BUT, there is a bottleneck, if a quad core has only 4 threads, the game will probably feed more data to the cpu that this can pick up, no matter at what speed it can work on it.
This is the problem that 4C/4T cpus are seeing right now, they have a input bottleneck. This was the point were 4C/8T started to matter in games. (on this gen).
High speed 4C/8T cpus should be fine for this generation +2 years after, unless we are talking about a PC only game that is not limited by console hardware.
This does not means 6C/12T or 8C/16T cpu cant be faster, im talking about the bare minimum you need to run the game like in a console. And for some of us that is not enoght.
*DirectX is a big issue as well, with DX12 being too hard to implement properly on variable hardware and DX11 having very limited MT and too old, that is a problem for all games in general.