As a consumer, I love all of this competition. I have an M1 Max in my laptop, a 5950X in my homelab server, and I'll probably put this i5-12600K in my personal/gaming PC. They all have different strengths and I'm benefiting from it in every domain.
I agree, though, about all the competition, even if we don't agree on power consumption. But I think it's a use-case/personal preference thing. These are tools or toys, depending on use, and if you use a system as a tool, and a high-end CPU saves you time by doing things faster, overlooking power consumption makes sense.
Personally, I like to cut costs where possible, while also avoiding high power usage and fan noise, so I like efficient systems that do enough. The i5-12600K is enough, though it doesn't make sense in my personal situation where I could upgrade to a Ryzen 5000 chip without any other changes.
I also dislike Microsoft putting their latest and greatest CPU software in Windows 11, as I currently have no wish to change my gaming PC over to that system.
But the main thing is just that Intel has been cramming high power and heat into CPUs for quite a few years now, and I'm eager to see the other end of it, where top chips can manage what they're doing without 200W or more. We know it's possible, because AMD and Apple have efficient, performant chips.
AMD and other smaller competitors seem to have a lot of "street cred" for being value-players. Strangely, so does Apple (at least on the computer front).
Comments implying the i9, a product that exists to gain max performance at all costs, should be put down for high power consumption. At the same time the same comments act like the rest of the range can be ignored because they're not the fastest of the bunch.