If it works for him than what's wrong with that.?AMD offer better options in the majority of workloads. You are talking about a very bias view of the 12900K Atom core performance in very specific scenarios, a chip that is just about EOL and pretty poor choice for those kinds of workloads.
I for example love using emulators and since switching to AMD cpus the experience wasn't great. Even now Intel cpus are quite a bit faster than AMD in this regard.
If it wasn't for the fact that LGA1700 is a dead platform now I would go with 13700k instead of 7800x3d and It would cost me less and give me more multithreaded performance.
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-13900k/15.html