Absolutely this - even some aggressively optimised stuff like game engines don't have insurmountable amounts of micro optimisations in them. Also - why would A

Absolutely this - even some aggressively optimised stuff like game engines don't have insurmountable amounts of micro optimisations in them. Also - why would Apple massively up and change uArchs? Even if they did decide to turn Apple Silicon into not-ARM, I'd wager it would look a lot more like ARM than for example, x86 does.