The Ryzen 7 3700X looks like it hits a sweet spot. 65W TDP, $330, almost as fast as a 9900k. Was originally planning to go for the Ryzen 5, but with these specs it seems silly not to go for the 3700X.
But it isn't really visible when money is no object. If it's not the cores getting faster it's the core-count going up. Moore's Law is really easy to beat if you focus on making your CPU die's larger instead of their transistors smaller.
So upgrading from a 4 to 8 core a few years back was expensive and mostly not worth it for gaming, whereas now it might actually give the huge speedup the core count would indicate (Obviously for gaming this just means moving the bottleneck, but still)
This is changing a past situation where say a CPU would lose half its value in 3 years. This incentivizes spending big and upgrading infrequently.
i'm sure 100 JPL astrophysicists will pile in here but i've been using an AMD 3.2ghz quad core processor purchased in 2010 for software development in java, scala, clojure and now golang as a daily driver up until today. i've replaced the RAM twice, power supply once, and the video card once.
i proudly use linux so i'm not sure what the situation is like with other OSes, so i'll budget some for things like windows "growing" over the years, but it's just not necessary for me to update the processor until it dies.