Perhaps they were referencing the highest 8C chip. Certainly, a 5950X is faster, but it also has double the number of cores (counting only performance on the M1; I don't know if the 2 efficiency cores do anything on the multi-core benchmark). Not to mention the power consumption differences - one is in a laptop and the other is a desktop CPU.
Looking at a 1783/12693 on an 8-core CPU shows about a 10% scaling penalty from 1 to 8 cores - suppose a 32-core M1 came out for the Mac Pro that could scale only at 50% per core, that would still score over 28000, compared to the real-world top scorer, the 64-core 3990X scoring 25271.
The A15 efficiency cores will be in the next model. They are A76-level performance (flagship-level for Android from 2019-2020), but use only a tiny bit more power than the current efficiency cores.
At that point, their E-cores will have something like 80% the performance of a Zen 1 core. Zen 1 might not be the new hotness, but lots of people are perfectly fine with their Threadripper 1950X which Apple could almost match with 16 E-cores and only around 8 watts of peak power.
I suspect we'll see Apple joining ARM in three-tiered CPUs shortly. Adding a couple in-order cores just for tiny system processes that wake periodically, but don't actually do much just makes a ton of sense.
Looking at a 1783/12693 on an 8-core CPU shows about a 10% scaling penalty from 1 to 8 cores - suppose a 32-core M1 came out for the Mac Pro that could scale only at 50% per core, that would still score over 28000, compared to the real-world top scorer, the 64-core 3990X scoring 25271.