Who were the benchmarks aimed at?
Consumers want to compare devices for size, weight, price, battery life & functionality. We mostly don't care how the manufacturers achieve it but there is some brand loyalty.
Device makers want to compare SoCs so they know what other chips or modules they need to buy and find space for within their device. If all other things were equal, a physically smaller SoC would reduce the overall device cost. Device makers are probably a lot more focused on the overall costs than consumers but still aware of the consumers' brand preferences.
SoC makers want to compare CPU cores so they know what other functionality they could or should cram into the same SoC to make it more attractive to device makers. There are many choices that influence the balance here - a better core could need less memory, or the same amount of cheaper memory. Less memory could allow on-die space for hardware to assist the radios. The flexibility of choices created by the competitive ARM eco-system is the killer feature here.
I'm only a consumer so I assume that the SoC makers & device makers have better access to more relevant (& accurate) figures to make their decisions. But as with most techies, I would be very curious to see a real like-for-like comparison at each level for shipping products: Intel & ARM cores, Intel and ARM-based SoCs, Intel-based and ARM-based devices with the same price/feature/performance envelope.
Unfortunately this article therefore seems of no value to device makers, SoC makers or techie consumers like me.