I totally see your point and agree with your path! I just wanted to point out that the core amount is more debilitating now than it might have been a few years ago. My 9700k can run battlefront 2 or bf1 and 144hz locked. It's just since 2021 spec requirements on the cpu side have spiked since they more than doubled the cores and threads across the board. It's completely silly that bf2042 looks worse than bf5 in a lot of situations but has my cpu crying for death lol.

Cpu limited stuttering is way worse than gpu too. Marvel rivals I'm pulling 80-90fps in fights which is honestly impressive, the issue being it feels like total shit because it is the cpu that is redlining.

If you run into the same issue, you can use process Explorer to keep your cpu under 97%, which makes it feel much better