The M1 was not Apple's first custom processor. They have had a performance advantage in mobile for years as the article shows. Especially for single core compute bound workloads.

The latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is not shown in the article but it more or less closed the gap on multi core when compared to A17, but lags behind in single core.

For graphics workloads Android phones are much more competitive and often beat Apple parts.