There is no zen 5 fiasco, its a significant upgrade from last gen
gamers will get their chips in a couple of months and see the extra cache uplift.
people who need a workstation got their upgrade now and the upgrade is good considering the power savings
The media hype train has been pretty aggressive and It is somewhat disappointing that there is this much of a performance regression let alone any performance regression at all which kind of shocked me.
Now is it possible AMD decided not to push the chip to the limit so PBO overclocking continues to look like a useful feature.
Looking at this from another perspective let's say you're coming from Zen3 and prices have had a chance to settle a bit where 9700x pretty much settles down in price where 7700x was then it doesn't look so bad. Clearly though if you are a power point user or rely on virtualization you aren't getting much of an improvement.
Now apply this theoretically to 9950x (which we don't have the numbers for yet). For example I use virtualization every day for work using VMWare. Going from 5950x to 9950x (assuming trends like in the above graph still hold) it seems like I might get next to zero meaningful benefit from upgrading so then why bother? Why bother upgrading to the older 7950x/7950x3d either for minimal gains in this scenario? (disclaimer: to be fair the TPU testing is against Virtual Box not VMWare so the benchmark doesn't exactly reflect the use case)
I wouldn't say this is a fiasco but it's a potential chance for some disappointment in some corner case scenarios.