Apple Silicon is optimized for performance per watt, where they beat the holy living pants off AMD and Intel. They then take this hardware and stretch it to the point where it does that vast majority of things that their desktop client market wants to do, and does that very well.

Apple has intentionally given up on going for the absolute fastest top end CPU horsepower, either in single core or multi core. If you want to run massive GPU loads, that's not a market they want to kill themselves for. You'd be better off running that in the cloud, anyway where you can rent the hardware you need for that for a few dollars, then throw it away when you're done.

But that doesn't sell clicks or ads. Only the blood curdlingest zit poppingest single or giga multicore numbers will do for the mainstream media.

Meanwhile, Apple continues to make billions and billions of dollars optimizing their hardware and their software to best serve the largest number of customers they can, and optimizing for the best performance per watt for the broadest possible array of customers. And do so in a way that most of these machines can provide better price/performance than most anything else on the market, and better battery lifetime than anything else in the market. Which makes a lot of people mad, and so they have to write nasty articles about it.

Hell, the MacBook Air 15" with 24GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD is still way more laptop than 95% of people need (better than the standard dev spec laptops in 99% of even the MANGA companies), and for those people who do want bigger and faster machines, Apple can still provide that, too.