They stretched the app core clocks quite a bit. For sure they had a lot of historical performance lead they had to burn to stay relevant but I don't think it would have been easy to get 14nm as far as they have. It has definitely got very little to give going forward though.
With all of the processor flaw mitigations, we saw the Lake series effectively lose all of their gains, however slim, between each generation.
Rocket Lake, the newest, still gets a 2 to 16% performance hit (depending on task) with mitigations on.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=spectre-...
At this point, Intel is behind where they started with the Core line.