You're just back to arguing that general purpose benchmarks are worthless again. Yes, they're not as applicable to the performance of a specific application as

You're just back to arguing that general purpose benchmarks are worthless again. Yes, they're not as applicable to the performance of a specific application as testing that application in particular, but you don't always have a specific application in mind. Many systems run a wide variety of different applications. And a benchmark can then provide a reasonable cross-section of different applications. Or it can yield scores that don't reflect real-world performance differences, implying that it's poorly designed.