Well, short high load sounds like typical usage for some smartphone tasks. Like open a browser, load heavy website, check something and shutdown. If phone can boost CPU, I can load website faster. And if benchmarks want to test for a prolonged duration, surely they can just run longer?

Are you implying that short burst performance is for gaming benchmarks?

Nope, not implying that at all. For some games that may make sense, but I think that'd fall under the sustained heavy CPU/GPU usage category for most games. Same for compiling large apps, interactive HTML5 PWAs and such.

By gaming benchmarks, I mean falsifying results. Burst performance is the normal optimization for all CPUs and GPUs.

I am now very confused about which usage of the term "gaming" y'all are referring to.

Intel has been doing this for ages. It may even be the primary reason why they came up with Turbo Boost. It's gotten a lot worse these days, as Turbo Boost can add another Ghz on its own to the base clock, which allows Intel to keep base clocks very low, yet still claim its chips are as fast as if they always run at the peak Turbo Boost speed all the time (and that turbo boost running time has been shrinking every new generation, too).