That there is no perfect defense. There is no protection. Being alive means being exposed; it’s the nature of life to be hazardous—it’s the stuff of living.
I would argue if your budget allows you to, it’s better to get 8 cores.
Any benefit for paying for 12 or 16?
Only if you do demanding use cases other than gaming. One example is video editing and encoding (the type that should not be done on a GPU).
Some games do benefit from having 16 cores, things like economic strategy games with lots of background simulation (one example would be path finding).
Just like their original benchmarks were showing 3000+ in Geekbench ST and then not even a single device came close to this result.