The lie is that hyper thread "cores" are equal to real "cores". Maybe this is what happens when an over 20-year old technology (hack) becomes ubiquitous and gets forgotten about? (We have to rediscover why our performance measurements don't seem to make sense?)

The other thing I think we have a hard time visualizing is that processor is only either executing (100%) or its waiting to execute (0%) and that happens over varying timescales... so trying to assign a % in between inherently means you're averaging over some arbitrary timescale...