Offering a good faith alternative explanation, I would hope that the main reason many people obsess over benchmarks and performance metrics is because GPUs are

Offering a good faith alternative explanation, I would hope that the main reason many people obsess over benchmarks and performance metrics is because GPUs are damn expensive — buyers would want to know that the money they're spending has tangible benefits. I'd like to think that once someone actually loads a game in order to play it, they'll actually focus on the game. (As a parallel example, I love the idea of seeing films in 3D, 4K, HDR etc, but I rarely notice the difference within ten minutes of the film starting. There's a reason why digital cinema got along fine at 2K for so long: extra detail really, really, really doesn't matter.)