MS Office apps have always been (possibly intentionally?) horrifically bad on Mac. Not a great benchmark IMO.
The average Joe user just uses a browser and something like Spotify. Even most word processing by college students is in Google Docs now - very few people I knew bought MS Office for their Macs when I was in college 5 years ago, even with a $99 student license through the school.
It's a perfect benchmark because even 20 years later performance is only getting worse, rather than better.
Developers will use all available resources until their is pressure to be more efficient. This is not a critique of developers, this is the nature of software. Unless critical development time is spent making sure that software is responsive, it will only ever have barely acceptable performance.
Which is why new, faster CPUs have very little effect on users. Any performance gains will be gobbled up by new software frameworks that promise better use of developer time, but which may come at an absolutely tremendous cost of UI responsiveness.
Spotify, Slack, Office on Mac, hyper complex JavaScript web frameworks... all will continue to take more and more CPU cycles that are available.
The average Joe user just uses a browser and something like Spotify. Even most word processing by college students is in Google Docs now - very few people I knew bought MS Office for their Macs when I was in college 5 years ago, even with a $99 student license through the school.