I bought a 12 core 3900X. Outside of the very narrow domain of professional tools I built it for, I'd have been better served with a quad core desktop Tiger Lake.
Most things aren't strictly single core any more and you're running multiple apps, but after you pass two cores with HT you've already soaked up most of that extra parallelism for everyday tasks.
Considering you can get a workstation with 64 cores and 16 is now high end consumer, the single core performance bottleneck is real.
Chrome might spawn a bunch of processes but they aggressively sleep all but your active tabs.
Most things aren't strictly single core any more and you're running multiple apps, but after you pass two cores with HT you've already soaked up most of that extra parallelism for everyday tasks.
Considering you can get a workstation with 64 cores and 16 is now high end consumer, the single core performance bottleneck is real.
Chrome might spawn a bunch of processes but they aggressively sleep all but your active tabs.