It's bench score on single thread is 0.6% better than the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, which have a lower TDP and was released 6 months before. Boths use the same lithography node. If you look at the chip by their lithography node, the Apple silicons are the same than the others...

Apple's M-series chips are fantastic, but I do agree with you that it's mostly a combination of newer process and lots of cache.

Even when they were new, they competed with AMD's high end desktop chips. Many years later, they're still excellent in the laptop power range - but not in the desktop power range, where chips with a lot of cache match it in single core performance and obliterate it in multicore.

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4-vs-amd_ry...