2. The review says single core Geekbench performance is 1290, same as i5-10500 which is also similar to N150, which is 1235.
3. You can still get N150s with 16gb ram in a case for $200 all in.
Single core, yes. Multi core score is much higher for this SBC vs the N150.
if you are talking about ancient hardware, yes, it's mostly driven by single core performance. But any console more recent than the 2000s will hugely benefit from multiple cores (because of the split between CPU and GPU, and the fact that more recent consoles also had multiple cores, too).
You're probably right about "most workloads", but as a single counter-example, I added several seasons of shows to my N305 Plex server last night, and it pinned all eight threads for quite a while doing its intro/credit detection.
I actually went and checked if it would be at all practical to move my Plex server to a VM on my bigger home server where it could get 16 Skymont threads (at 4.6ghz vs 8 Gracemont threads at ~3ghz - so something like 3x the multithreaded potential on E-cores). Doesn't really seem workable to use Intel Quick Sync on Linux guests with a Hyper-V host though.