The world wouldn't come to an end or anything, but if we didn't have so many cutting edge chips, we'd generally be spending more money to use lesser chips to perform fewer and lesser tasks while consuming more resources to do so.

They reduce power consumption and thermal management needs. That means more compute per a given battery constraint or thermal envelope. High-end mobile phones and laptops benefit.

Is consumer computing really the major demand now and going forward. Or is it senors, automation, networking, and cloud compute?

And I can almost garuentee it's better for the environment if I continue using my device or an old one rather than upgrading to the new iphone soon.

Thankfully web developers took care of that.