1. It is unlikely the CPU is a serious bottleneck in many of those circumstances. Even if it takes a measurable amount of time, that does not mean a faster CPU will make a meaningful improvement, if even measurable improvement. If you think it will, try overclocking and measuring your gmail load times.
2. Like I said, in my experience Ryzen also competes just fine in single core. It just also decimates in multicore. I’d rather have some tasks run significantly faster than have some run very slightly faster. But that is disregarding the fact that not all tasks are the same and it does in fact win some categories. These CPU architectures are more divergent than usual for lately.
3. Things you think aren’t parallel are. Video games using modern graphics APIs are in fact able to exploit multicore CPUs. Browsers absolutely exploit multicore CPUs. Your system in general will exploit multicore CPUs so during general usage when you are doing more things and have more software running, single core performance will be hurt less. And so on.
Your email reader, word, youtube and IDE isn't likely to push the limits on any modern CPU, your video game is increasingly optimized around multiple cores because modern consoles ship with multi core cpu's and they need all the performance they can out of them. Only thing that might benefit from single cpu performance is probably your general python code.
Gmail and the IDE take ten seconds to load, while youtube is destroying any CPU to watch a 4k video (or 1080p on a battery saving laptop).
Youtube is possibly the single largest root cause for users upgrading laptops over the past 10 years. They made a silent transition to 60 FPS videos last year which cut hundreds of millions of users from watching HD.
OTOH, I know what your talking about, my linux machine hates youtube, but that's because even with the chromium freeworld fork with some codec acceleration its still burning CPU like crazy.
So, a big part of this isn't a hardware problem so much as a software one combined with the constant fights over who's codec is the one true choice. AKA its a youtube and !windows/android+chrome problem.
2. Like I said, in my experience Ryzen also competes just fine in single core. It just also decimates in multicore. I’d rather have some tasks run significantly faster than have some run very slightly faster. But that is disregarding the fact that not all tasks are the same and it does in fact win some categories. These CPU architectures are more divergent than usual for lately.
3. Things you think aren’t parallel are. Video games using modern graphics APIs are in fact able to exploit multicore CPUs. Browsers absolutely exploit multicore CPUs. Your system in general will exploit multicore CPUs so during general usage when you are doing more things and have more software running, single core performance will be hurt less. And so on.