A not-quite-relevant trivia: Early versions of the Larrabee were also supposed to have 32 of what could now be called E-cores.
A 32-core x86 processor in PC would have been pretty outlandish back in 2008, even though it was supposed to be a GPU.
It did happen as Xeon Phi, the successor of Larambee. The first version released which was Knights Corner used a modified version of the original Pentium cores, with a notable addition being SMT 4(i.e. 4 hardware threads per core).
The next iteration of Xeon Phi which is Knight Landing then used a modified Atom core(Airmont) also with SMT 4 having chips with up to 72 cores. Those atom cores are what we know today as E cores or rather being a direct lineage from it as architecture wise it went
Airmont -> Goldmont -> Tremont -> Gracemont(Alder/Raptor lake E-core) -> Crestmont(Meteor Lake E core) -> Skymont (Arrow and Lunar Lake E-cores).
So it did already happened in the past though those were modified versions of it, with the mentioned Hyper Threading x4 and also having full fat AVX512 implementations.
For other consumer products, we could argue that the PS3 processor, the Cell engine, was also very similar. It had a single 'fast' core and 8 others slower(same clock but lower IPC due to simpler design) cores(but which had strong vector capabilities).
Though those cores didn't have direct access to the system memory and had only indirect access through DMA.
It doesn't seem like the idea of many very simple cores paid off as the Atom line basically developed into basically big cores with very complex out of order designs instead of the simpler in order designs of the past. And maybe that is why Intel cancelled 8+32, there was just too little tangible benefit to have that many cores for the intended consumers.
For those who actually can use such high core counts, they would likely be best served by the Xeon W or Threadrippers series.
