That's a fair point above sustained multicore, but this is probably the right tradeoff for this class of device. Few people are regularly maxing out all of their cores for more than a few minutes at a time, and the people who are doing that probably weren't going to buy Apple's budget $600 MacBook anyway. The increase in single core performance over the M1 is much more valuable to most users.
That's probably true, although once again it's the sustained _single core_ performance that suffers. Statements like "the A18 Pro has much better single core performance than the M1" without this context still aren't true.