Well, I’m blaming Samsung. They have full control over cpu / gpu governor and clock settings (which they profoundly messed up in the past). It’s just a sleeker, more casual-user-(read: idiot)-friendly UI that prevents any real proper of tweaking. I’m not an “everything was better in the old days” guy, but in the case of Android, it really was. That sweet time period around 2012-2016, when you could root the crap out of devices, and apply automatic cpu core and clock adjustments on a per-app basis, that was great. There was a great tool, can’t remember it’s name, that let you configure all sorts of stuff.
For example, as soon as I launched Magic Dosbox on my Note 4, my tweaks would shut down cores 2&3 completely, downclock core 4 to 800 MHz to handle light background load, and lock the first core to max clocks. The Snapdragon 805 was notorious for overheating and downthrottling, and the Note 4 usually scored around 2000 realtics in the benchmark, before it started to overheat (90+°C), and thermal throttle, rendering the device useless. With my extra tweaks, I could push it to 1370 realtics, with temperatures around 65-70°C, and no thermal throttling at all.
But hey, thank you, Google & Samsung, for taking away all these possibilies for no real reason at all.
/rant off 😉