Well speaking purely as a gamer and a hardware enthusiast, I have to disagree with both you and Mr. Torvalds.
I like the prospect of having wide vectors on CPUs, because they have sped up encoding/decoding algorithms immensely, and also because of how they can be used to make complex physics effects run much faster on a CPU.
As a long time PC gamer, I can reminisce back to the P4 and Athlon 64 days where running a single instance of cloth simulation on a CPU would cause the framerate to tank to single digit framerates. The inability of CPUs to handle those kinds of workloads is exactly what led Ageia to design a PPU, and then Nvidia to implement hardware accelerated physics calculations on their GPUs with PhysX. Theoretically a GPU was much better suited to physics calculations than a CPU, but in practice, there were limitations involved due to the high latencies from processing across the PCIe bus, overwhelming the GPU with too much work and not to mention vendor lock in so it never flourished.
Fast forward 15 years later, we now have high core count CPUs with SMT and wide vectors and physics calculations that once needed hardware acceleration now run at blazing speeds; faster than running it on a GPU in some cases like cloth simulation. For me, realistic physics is the last bastion of game technology that needs to be conquered. 3D rendering has advanced greatly over the years, but physics and animation quality has improved much slower.
With the next generation of consoles having much more capable CPUs, I expect that trend to change. AVX2 will see massive adoption in games. In fact, UE5 will have the Chaos physics engine which is optimized with Intel's
ISPC compiler and targets the vector instruction sets that Mr. Torvalds is so disparaging towards.
But like I said, I'm looking at this purely as a consumer and not as an industry professional.