Consumer grade CPUs are driven by a variety of things - marketing, brand loyalty, gaming benchmarks, reviewers such as Anantech and Extremetech, and yes, Geekbench scores. Datacenter processors are a whole another beast and driven by proprietary benchmarks by vendors.

Geekbench runs so many different tests, atleast a couple of dozens of tests. So, if CPU manufacturers are optimizing to those tests, its hard to believe that that's not a good thing and would apply to pretty much what an average user does in the first place.