As someone who switched from a 6600K to a 1700, don't let the pretty benchmarks fool you. These are done on clean systems with nothing running in the background.
In a real use case where you have things running in the background (discord, YouTube playing music, maybe Windows decides it want to do some maintenance, etc), frametime variance can be hit quite hard on the 6600K.
Meanwhile Ryzen just chugs along since it has a lot of spare resources to deal with background tasks. There is a real and perceptible difference to using the two in a real world scenario.
I hear ya, but that is due to lack of threads more than anything. I doubt you will see such a variance with a 4C/8T CPU like a 6700K for example. 4C/4T CPUs are starting to struggle with the latest AAA games, but personally I simply upgraded from a 2500K to a 3770 (overclocked to 4.4GHz) and I'm good to go for another couple of years at least with 'Ryzen level' gaming performance.