Since AMD has introduced its first 7 nm chip, Intel's 14-nm chips have never been competitive.
Intel's 14-nm process has only 1 advantage over any other process node, including Intel's own 10 nm: the highest achievable clock frequency, of up to 5.3 GHz.
This advantage is very important for games, but not for most other purposes.
Since the first 7-nm chip of AMD, their CPUs consume much less power at a given clock frequency than Intel's 14 nm.
Because of this, whenever more cores are active, so that the clock frequency is limited by the total power consumption, the clock frequency of the AMD CPUs is higher than of any Intel CPU with the same number of active cores, which lead to AMD winning any multi-threaded benchmark even with Zen 2, when they still did not have the advantage of a higher IPC than Intel, like they have with Zen 3.
With the latest Intel's 10 nm process variant, Intel has about the same power consumption at a given frequency and the same maximum clock frequency as the TSMC 7 nm proces.
So Intel should have been able to compete now with AMD, except that they still appear to have huge difficulties in making larger chips in sufficient quantities, so they are forced to use workarounds, like the launch of the Tiger Lake H35 series of laptop CPUs with smaller dies, to have something to sell until they will be able to produce the larger 8-core Tiger Lake H CPUs.
"This advantage is very important for games, but not for most other purposes."
I disagree. The majority of desktop applications are only lightly threaded e.g. Adobe products, office suites, Electron apps, anything mostly written before 2008.
Save for heavy lifting in Adobe products those other apps don't meaningfully benefit from higher clock speeds as their operations aren't CPU bound. The high speed Intel chips see an advantage when there's a single CPU bound process maxing out a core. Office and Slack don't tend to do that (well maybe Slack...). Also if you've got multiple processes running full tilt Intel's clock speed advantage goes away because the chip clocks down so as to not melt.
So with a heavy desktop workload with multiple processes or threads the Intel chips aren't doing any better than AMD. It's only in the single heavy worker process situation where Intel's got the advantage and that advantage is only tens of percentage points better than AMD.
So Intel's maximum clock speed isn't the huge advantage it might seem.
You are right that those applications benefit from a higher single-thread performance.
Nevertheless, unlike in competitive games, the few percents of extra clock frequency that Intel previously had in Comet Lake versus Zen 2 and which Intel probably will have again in Rocket Lake versus Zen 3, are not noticeable in office applications or Web browsing, so they are not a reason to choose one vendor or the other.
Intel's 14-nm process has only 1 advantage over any other process node, including Intel's own 10 nm: the highest achievable clock frequency, of up to 5.3 GHz.
This advantage is very important for games, but not for most other purposes.
Since the first 7-nm chip of AMD, their CPUs consume much less power at a given clock frequency than Intel's 14 nm.
Because of this, whenever more cores are active, so that the clock frequency is limited by the total power consumption, the clock frequency of the AMD CPUs is higher than of any Intel CPU with the same number of active cores, which lead to AMD winning any multi-threaded benchmark even with Zen 2, when they still did not have the advantage of a higher IPC than Intel, like they have with Zen 3.
With the latest Intel's 10 nm process variant, Intel has about the same power consumption at a given frequency and the same maximum clock frequency as the TSMC 7 nm proces.
So Intel should have been able to compete now with AMD, except that they still appear to have huge difficulties in making larger chips in sufficient quantities, so they are forced to use workarounds, like the launch of the Tiger Lake H35 series of laptop CPUs with smaller dies, to have something to sell until they will be able to produce the larger 8-core Tiger Lake H CPUs.