You should compare it to other than the old Apple laptops. The Ryzen models, such as ThinkPad T14 are very fast, and if you want to go tenfold from there, there is no comparison with the modern Ryzen desktop CPUs. Why Apple always failed with Intel and its thermals is why they feel so slow compared to the M1.
But they are extremely bad with their thermals and Intel is way slower than whatever AMD is pushing right now. The thing is Apple just made quite mediocre hardware. And now they're back where the competition is.
I just can't even imagine what the gap is going to look like when Apple really refines this down.