I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the geekbench developers are heavily supported by apple's own performance engineers and that testing might not be as objective or indicative of real world perf as one would hope.
From the data side: the M4 hasn't made it to the charts yet but the M3 already holds the 4th place in PassMark's single thread chart as well https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html as well as tops Cinebench 2024 https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_benchmark-cinebench_2024_s...
The only areas the M series "lags" is in the high end workstation/server segment where they don't really have a 96+ core option or in spaces where you pop in beefy high end GPUs. Everything else the M4 tends to lead in right now.
My bad.
And just to be clear: I didn't speculate that Apple tune's its chip to Geekbench, I speculated that geekbench was overly optimized towards apple's latest chip.
I know iOS developers who recently upgraded their MacBooks and they claim they now feel more sluggish. I wouldn't be surprised if it was due to RAM constraints instead of CPU though.
So, take those artificial bencmarks with a grain of salt. They are so optimized that they are optimized out of the real world.