No, core count is meaningless. What matters in most desktop cases is price per performance , especially price per performance in your specific use (what's your percentage of single thread vs multi thread work, mostly). In a server scenario often performance per watt will be king.

If Ryzen can deliver a similar Cinebench score to a CPU hundreds and hundreds dollars more expensive then they have a something. Whether they do that by occult magic or squeezing more cores/threads in, doesn't matter to the end user.