People may find that manufactured or "oh IQ is just made up and there is no measure of intelligence". But I find beauty in the way that IQ tests create and reconfigure a distribution across a multi-dimensional vector or dimensional space. It figures out what we need in the general case, and allows us to use and reason with it, without ever having to do the grunt work or arguably impossible task of finding out an actual measure of intelligence or some way to untangle the way a brain works.

That's a problem with it: its high legibility masks the complex (and deceptively muddy) math underneath it. Cosma Shalizi's "Statistical Myth" essay is a good dive into this; the "general factor" underneath all the different IQ tests is more or less a statistical inevitability, reproducing even with totally random tests.