The number of generations of processors where this has been true is really astounding to me. It really makes me wonder why they persist with this line of effort instead of doing something else, like cores that share logic units only.
Because for a large number of workloads, hyperthreading gives real performance improvements.
The vast majority of consumers aren't running compute heavy workloads that are more amenable to SIMD work (which it sounds like this might be) than the sort of highly branching, often stalled work that general purpose programs do.
Use cases are different. I would imagine the poster above is able to saturate all the cores, but in the case of the regular user, the cores spend most of their time waiting for data.
