you're really going out of your way to try and justify paying 2x the price for nearly identical performance....OK, so let's say you put that savings somewhere else? How about fancier plugins for Avid or Premiere? Well, you're going to say that you will be purchasing those anyway...
OK, so why should no pros actually care about saving $500? What is the reason?
Because time is money. If you're transcoding content on the fly or offline and you're saving 10 hrs per month you'll have made back those $500 in no time. It's not even a consideration for the high end users.
And 'no', it's not "nearly identical" in some cases, and in the cases where that matters... well, then it matters. It doesn't matter what you or I think about that, what matters is if this group of content producers need the performance or not. I say they do.
You can even look at it this way: Suppose we tier CPUs in absolute maximum performance, just for the sake of argument, and the list goes something like this;
6950
6900
1800x
Now, cut out the 1800x, meaning you go back in time 4 months.... Did Intel sell 6950 CPUs? So, how does the 1800x change things for the people that buy the 6950?
And again: People keep ignoring the lane count. It's not irrelevant. It doesn't matter if your CPU performs at 80% of the top Intel CPU for 50% of the cost if you
need lanes that the Ryzen doesn't provide. A requirement is a requirement.