That's a fair point above sustained multicore, but this is probably the right tradeoff for this class of device. Few people are regularly maxing out all of their cores for more than a few minutes at a time, and the people who are doing that probably weren't going to buy Apple's budget $600 MacBook anyway. The increase in single core performance over the M1 is much more valuable to most users.
That's probably true, although once again it's the sustained _single core_ performance that suffers. Statements like "the A18 Pro has much better single core performance than the M1" without this context still aren't true.
The A18's sustained single core performance is about the same as the M1's and the "burst" performance is quite a bit better. So I'd say it clearly has better single core performance overall.