The main advantage of using custom silicon is that you can decide the naming and so you deceive users that the minor 0.1 update is a full generation advance
Kinda like I saw someone saying "apple skipped A17 for the iPhone 16 and gave the faster A18" - they're in charge of the naming and they can easily decide that A18 = A17
In the real world with real people, what matters is efficiency. Top performance that you can only achieve in benchmarks is not any indicative of efficiency.
I don't care about any game stats for my phone but it is annoying that my P9P XL lags when it's connected to AA and I want to grab it fast, double click the power button to open the camera and snap a quick picture.
I've experienced the same lag with previous Pixels. Assumed it was a RAM issue and maybe it is, but it's annoying nonetheless.