You're certainly correct for, say, highly-controlled benchmarks but don't discount subjective user experience. I've heard _far_ more M1 users talk about the subjective feel compared to even the previous generation MacBook hardware whereas it's been a long time since I've heard that about an Intel to Intel upgrade (basically since the Core -> Core Duo period) other than people with GPU-heavy needs and that seems like an interesting data-point to me.
I do wonder how much of that is just getting a nice new laptop? If the average user was handed the equivalent laptop with an Intel CPU but told it was an M1 would they notice? Would they also think it was nice and fast?
Here is why I think your hypothesis is not true: people were buying new Macs also before M1, but it did not generated the same reactions. So newness is not the cause of this or at least it is not the only cause.
Did Apple not market new hardware for a decade prior to M1? I don’t think this is sufficient to explain the difference, especially given the supporting benchmarks.
Possibly but it feels like that should have but has not happened to anything like this degree when people were getting shiny new Intel CPUs after the early 2010s.