One thing I noticed is that min/max functions are tricky to use and it's easily to accidentally do the wrong thing, like in this case
Because you think "you want the minimum (that is, the number should be at least 8) of those numbers to be 8" then you slap min(). And you got it wrong. You should have used max()
But that aside, I feel your pain around min() and max(). In my case, I feel the problem comes from language (I mean, the real life one): I speak Italian and in Italian the words for "at most" are "al massimo" (i.e. "at max") and the words for "at least" are "come minimo" (i.e. "as min") that is, the exact opposite of their mathematical meaning. I've taken an habit of reviewing 3 times any piece of code where I write "min" or "max" for this reason.
I appears the author has misunderstood exactly what was its purpose, and that setting this scaling factor unbound beyond 8 cores would have detrimental effects even if there are more cores available.
x.atLeast(10).atMost(100)