Awful compared to what?

I've seen benchmarks that go both ways in terms of a "winner" but in terms of overall variance there seems to be very little. There are some cases where ARM64 or RISCV do better and there are some cases where x86_64 does better. I can't see code density being a relevant factor when picking one ISA over another.

We've got good compilers now anyways.. outside of power consumption.. the ISA wars are dead.

> outside of power consumption.

This is a pretty huge caveat. >90% of cpus are <1W (usb cables, wifi cards, storage controllers etc), and 99% are <10W (phones, lots of laptops)

Compared to VAX, of course…

Technically, code density still matters - because both L1 cache memory and L1 instruction fetch misses are very expensive.

But as you point out, code density gets far less attention in tech circles these days. And higher-level decision makers rightfully focus on higher-level system performance metrics.