Gaming is very sensitive with network latency. Bandwidth is less important, but helps for downloading and installing games.
My observation was on how vocal gamers tend to be in their excitement about hardware. I see gaming media go nuts over CPU and GPU releases. There's excitement and detailed analysis of motherboards. I've seen in depth content on storage, and there's been a lot of hype over the PS5's new storage architecture. RAM gets attention. Obviously displays get lots of attention, both from a visual quality and refresh frequency perspective. There are endless buying guides for peripherals such as mice, keyboards, and headsets.
I don't tend to see much content on networking, nor anything approaching the excitement I've seen for any of the categories above.
These observations do not diminish the importance of the network in online gaming. I merely noted that networking hardware tends to generate less vocal excitement among gamers. Beyond networking equipment, I believe gamers lead in hardware excitement.
Outside of that, I agree.
That said, you should always wait for third party benchmarks from a source you trust, with benchmarks that relate to your production workloads. I like Anandtech, Phoronix, and Gamers Nexus for such reviews. The last, despite the name, includes a decent swath of non-gaming benchmarks, and they are incredibly transparent about benchmarking methodology, which I appreciate.
With the necessary caveat out of the way, some observations:
If the IPC gains are there, and we're seeing similar or higher clocks (which seems to be the case), then you should expect a pretty good uplift to non-gaming performance.
The cache architecture optimization should also be a boon to many workloads outside of gaming.