i3-12100f is almost 100 usd cheaper in most builds you would use extra cash for better gpu or just get i5-12400f with the same / lower price and higher clocks but lets wait for benchmarks.
For Intel, those are the cheapest of the cheap boards with the very limited H610 chipset. If you want something acceptable you will pay a lot more. AMD on the other hand has cheap good option with B550 or even B450.
I am interested in your belief that most builds needs GPU more than CPU, or that most builds even have GPUs. iGPUs have ~70% of the market. Most builds are going to spend the cash on CPU performance.
If you're buying the CPU separately, it means you'll be building the PC yourself, not a prebuilt. Upgrading the GPU instead of the CPU will give you better graphics performance, which is what most of the people building one want. The only reason iGPUs have such a large section of the market is because of people buying regular prebuilt to use as a general computer, not a gaming one.
That's not obviously true to me. Is graphics-intensive gaming - and I would point out that defining "gaming" as GPU-intensive would be too narrow - really that large of a market? I've personally built dozens of PCs and the last time I bought a GPU it was a 3DFX Voodoo.
i3-12100f is a 100$ 4 core chip, which should line up with Ryzen 3 4100 at $100 or possibly Ryzen 5 4500 at $129.