[themulticaster]

I think your question is a little too broad to answer precisely, as it depends on your definition of "making sense" - however, CPU cycles are still relevant in many aspects.

Generally speaking, just because modern x86 CPUs use numerous abstractions for high-level instruction set features does not mean they don't use cycles. (Clock) cycles are an inherent feature of synchronous logic, and all CPUs (modern as well as ancient) use synchronous logic. Yes, there might be some esoteric outliers, but 99.9% is synchronous.

The difference to ancient CPUs is that modern CPUs don't necessarily retire (essentially, "execute") an instruction in every clock cycle. In any given clock cycle, a CPU might retire none, just one or even multiple instructions.

A typical application (where clock cycles are important) is looking at the number of retired instructions per cycle (IPC), which can give a rough overview of whether a program is frontend-bound or backend-bound. You can try this yourself using "perf stat" (part of the Linux perf tools): Try running different applications using perf stat and look for "insn per cycle" in the report. You will generally find that interpreted programs (Python, Node etc.) will have a mediocre IPC of well below 1 (due to poor cache utilization and branch mispredictions) while compiled, optimized programs might reach an IPC of 2. A high IPC value is not necessarily better though, it's complicated^TM.