The 9600X operates at much lower single core clocks than the 14900KS so that shows the IPC gains of Zen 5 are indeed good. I'm sure Arrow Lake will take back the title, but for now, it's a nice result from AMD.
Why is the author acting surprised that the 9600X beats the 14900K in SINGLE core? It's single core, TDP has no bearing here. Then acting surprised that the 9600X gets beaten by the 14600K in multi core - once again, this is where TDP matters.
I would expect someone with over 800 published news articles under their belt to understand this distinction.
The AMD Ryzen 5 9600X with its 6x Zen 5 cores and a boost clock of 5.4 GHz is the least powerful member of the Zen 5 family. However, even with its 6 cores, the CPU could overtake the Intel Core i9-14900KS in single-core workloads per a valid Geekbench 6 benchmark result.