He ripped apart a very different benchmark for what it was worth, that was GB3 at the time I believe. 5 was a rewrite to make it cross platform-equal. In real world use it actually is far more relevant than thermally limited benchmarks. It just measures max peak burst performance...which is important because 90% of all users use their computer to do only bursty tasks rather than long term processing. See exporting a 10 second clip on an iPhone or loading a heavy SPA webpage on a Mac. These are 5 second burst tasks where real world use would not be thermally limited but would see real change consistent with Geekbench.

It's really only intended to be one of many benchmarks to tell the whole story; of course Linus would attack that because it doesn't make any real sense in his use and isn't the full story for him. If Geekbench was not tested, it would not cover the majority of computing uses and it would weigh cpus that had poor turbo or burst performance unfairly high for most uses.

Geekbench is kinda like 0-60MPH times and other tests (like SPEC2006) are like top speed I guess? The whole story is between them.