Intel's 10nm is approximately equal to TSMC's 7nm (even having advantages in some areas). The A-chips at 7nm (the A13) were already significantly ahead of Intel's offerings in efficiency and instructions per cycle. Intel went all in on a design that relegates performance to power gobbling turbo boost and here we are.

Just generally too much is made about node size. It isn't a magic pixie dust that you can sprinkle on a chip.

I certainly don't want to engage in chip advocacy wars, but it has been interesting seeing the goalposts moving. Last year it was just that Apple had some easily replicated, lazy big cache that was their key to performance, that's if you accept that it's actually high performance because Something Something Geekbench is a big lie and they're actual miserable performers. Now it's just node size. Super simple, trivial things that somehow discount what they're delivering.