It’s worth remembering that the PS4 and XB1 consoles both have eight relatively slow x64 cores. Thus any multiplatform titles targeting either of these platforms has to be optimised for many cores and cannot rely on single core performance.
Probably most games on that list don't use all cores. So yeah not "many" but "most". Thanks for the correction.
Per-thread performance really hasn't improved all that much since the days of, say, a 4.7 GHz 2600K. Core counts have gone up drastically, but that doesn't help your single-threaded game from 2007.
It very definitely takes advantage of far more than 1 or 2 cores, though, with 4 cores having ~2x the FPS compared to 2 cores.