Nope, it was said it wouldn't help. It was repeatedly claimed that games would not scale, that the MT model in gaming is with just a few heavy load threads and multiple light threads that don't really tax the CPU much.
That's not what I read. I have been on the side people that were damping down expectations, but I was certainly expecting many, if not most to show improvments. There may have been a fringe saying it wouldn't help, but they were a tiny minority.
Sure it's a case of diminishing returns, sure I'm just posting a few screenshots and we should check comprehensively across a wide spectrum of games, but here we are witnessing how a nearly 5 year old game shows a noticeable uptick in FPS due to increase in core count. Maybe this will finally open a few eyes.
You aren't just cherry picking an outlier game, but you are cherry picking an outlier frame, which is misleading in the extreme.
Here are results from Crysis 3, Eurogamer test. It does the best of just about any game tested, anywhere:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-intel-coffee-lake-core-i7-8700k-review
8700K 5.0Ghz 179.6
7700K 4.8GHz 145.5
That is a 23% gain, from 50% more cores (and 4% higher clock speed). That is what diminishing returns look like, and that is still one of the best results anywhere.