Benchmarks are benchmarks.
Without a (fairly) standardised set of testing methods, one simply cannot reliably compare the performance of something.
A car does 0-30 mph in x seconds on a hot sandy beach, and another does 0-62 mph in y seconds, on rainy day on grass. What use would x and y be to anyone, when comparing the two vehicles are for very similar purposes???
Intel have always had an instructions per clock advantage, so MHz for MHz, on a single thread, the Intel chip would complete a task quicker than an AMD chip with the same clock speed. The waters all got muddied with boost clocks, turbo, throttling etc. All well and good have x GHz single core speed, but when it tails off after a few minutes, that sucks.
I was looking to build a new PC to replace my old Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 machine. I started at Intel i7 4770k and kept looking at every new release and many things put me off. I didn't like the motherboard layouts, and I didn't like the shoddy putty being used to conduct heat from the chip die to the heat spreader.
AMD Ryzen and X370 chipset came along, and these seemed to offer everything I wanted in a platform. The heat spreader is soldered to the die, so I'm happy about that. The ASrock Tai-Chi X370 motherboard layout ticked all of the boxes. There are a couple of small teething issues, some BIOS tweaks are a bit odd, temperature reporting using an offset (really, still doing that?), a difficulty in getting exactly what the core voltage is supposed to be and how to read it without physically probing the board. Sure, the equivalent Intel i7 chip would be a little quicker in single threaded workloads, but I doubt I'd notice in real world use.
...and here is the thing - real world use.
I've read a couple of reviews, and one site did a huge comparison of performance on similarly spec'd machines AMD vs. Intel with the then current Adobe suite.
Benchmarks and stop watches showed which was faster in what areas and specific tasks (different filters in Photoshop maybe multi-threaded, despite a generally single threaded environment). But, the differences were not that huge really. A few seconds when a task took a few minutes - I doubt that anyone would really notice that on their home machine if they didn't have a stop watch.
The article mentions laptops as an example where benchmark performance stats. aren't everything. I agree, you are buying a product where usability, form factor, battery life, weight and other factors are important. It's like having the cleanest, most perfect DAC on the planet, but it's a stupid shape, weighs so much that four beefy fellas need to move it around, lights up like Blackpool tower as soon as you turn in on and the remote control randomises it's buttons every time you press a button. It'd be utterly unusable to the vast majority of people, but it measures soo well.
When it's about desktop PC components though, nah, benchmarks are important.