Seems to be based on the perspective that the focus is indeed on absolute performance gains rather than performance per power draw.

Based on the range of devices the M chips will be used for both immediately and in future it's not at all obvious that should be true. Think about the vision pro. Name of the game there is workable performance / battery tradeoff, not maxing out raw performance.

Same is true for most users of macbooks frankly, including (lots of) engineers using pros.

It wouldn't be surprising to me that an acceptable outcome of the shift to the new node was maintaining performance of M2 with gains in battery life. More performance will inevitably come with M4 etc anyway.