It's not just about better numbers. Getting high clocks for a short period helps in a lot of use cases - say random things like a search. If I'm looking for some specific phrase in my codebase in vscode, everything spins up for the second or two it takes to process that.

Boosting from 4 to 5,5.5 ghz for that brief period shaves a fraction of a second - repeat that for any similar operation and it adds up.

Yes, I figured that much would be obvious to this crowd. Thus the "pseudo" part.

The point isn't that there isn't a benefit, it's that you start to pay exponentially more energy per 0.1GHz at a certain point. Furthermore, AMD and Intel were exceptionally aggressive about it in the generations I outlined (AMD would be 7000 series ryzens specifically), leading to instability issues on both platforms due to their spec itself being too aggressive, or AIB partners improperly implementing that spec as the headroom that typically exists from factory stock to push clocks/voltages further was no longer there in some silicon (some of it comes down to silicon lottery and manufacturing defects/mistakes (Intel's oxidation issues for example) but we're really getting into the weeds on this already)

And to clarify: I'm talking specifically of Intel turboboost and AMD's PBO boosting technologies where they boost where they boost well over base clocks, separate from the general dynamic clocking behavior where clocks will drop well below base when not in (heavy) use.