There's still an insurmountable amount of apps that are still X86 exclusive both new and legacy. So the chip not beating the best of ARM in benchmarks is largely irelevant.
A Ferrari will beat a tractor on every test bench numbers and every track, but I can't plow the field with a Ferrari, so any improvements in tractor technology is still welcome despite they'll never beat Ferraris.
I hear this argument, but I don't really believe it.
If you're talking apps before say 2015 (10 years ago), they can be emulated on ARM faster than they ran natively. That rules out 95% of the backward compatibility argument.
Most more recent apps are very portable. They were written in a managed language running on a cross-platform runtime. The source code is likely stored in git so it can be tracked down and recompiled.
Over 15 years of modern smartphones has ensured that most low-level libraries have support for ARM and other ISAs too as being ISA-agnostic has once again become important. Apple's 4 years of transition aren't to be underestimated either. Lots of devs/creatives use ARM machines and have ensured that pretty much all of the biggest pro software runs very well on non-x86 platforms.
Yes, some stuff remains, but I don't think the remaining stuff is as big a deal as some people claim.
A Ferrari will beat a tractor on every test bench numbers and every track, but I can't plow the field with a Ferrari, so any improvements in tractor technology is still welcome despite they'll never beat Ferraris.