Not gonna lie, but I honestly think some of the people are rooting for AMD, only because their favorite console uses them. That's it. The real PC gamers know where the performance is, and they know what the budget option is. The only reason to go with AMD with it's current lineup is if you could save money over getting the rtx 2070. Otherwise, there wouldn't be much of an option to do so, and suddenly a synthetic benchmark is supposed to mean better raytracing and rasterization? Why am I getting multiple deja vu memories right now...
While you are probably right that some people are rooting for AMD simply because they provide the GPU/CPU in their console of choice, there are several key differences between the AMD of today and the AMD of 5 years ago.
In that timeframe AMD were almost bankrupt, their CPUs were had almost no marketshare/mindshare, had far worse performance than Intel and they were completely starved for cash for R&D and on the verge of shutting their doors.
Since then they got their act together with Ryzen CPUs and their market cap and revenue have skyrocketed. Their Ryzen CPUs are so good in fact and have continued to improve generation to generation that they are now the market leader in terms of performance and DIY desktop CPU sales (of new chips).
The company has grown immensely since in size and grown from strength to strength. This is now an AMD with the cash and talent to invest in R&D to compete.
That is one huge chunk of the puzzle, the other is the departure of Raja from the Radeon group. He is now over at Intel continuing to flounder in the graphics department so Radeon group has competent leadership now with a renewed focus now that their CPU business is stable and in a good position.
We saw the first steps of this with the RDNA1 architecture where the 5700XT punched way above its weight and competed very very well with Nvidia and the mid range and below. Anyone paying attention should have been able to see that this was the beginning of a change of pace for Radeon group.
Now RDNA2 seems to be further refining and improving that architecture along with help from the Ryzen engineers. This is not the Radeon group of old, to make things even better for them, Nvidia decided to own goal themselves by trying to cheap out on the inferior Samsung 8nm node.
This node has caused them tons of problems, from high power draw/heat, which also limits clockspeed, performance and overclocking potential to bad yields of the chips themselves which has contributed to Nvidia's supply shortages (along with them rushing the launch to get ahead of AMD).
If you are a fan of technology in general and want to see competition on the market again, especially in the high end to keep both competitors innovating and honest, then you should hopefully be pleasantly surprised by the 28th of October reveal, if not and if you were hypothetically for example a raging Nvidia fanboy then you are going to very very unpleasantly surprised come 28th of October.
These benchmarks also do not exist in isolation, we have evidence of high clock speeds, large chips with up to 80CUs on the top die etc....
For comparison, 5700XT was 251 mm² in size with 40CUs. Now double that size for Navi21 (500+mm2 is the current estimation), double the CUs, increase the clock speeds heavily, increase power efficiency by 50% (according to AMD targets) and add IPC and other architectural improvements/gains and of course you are going to get somewhat far more powerful than a 5700XT.
Simply put, the figures all pretty much match up with performance in the 3080 tier. I understand people don't want to get burned by expecting too much and being let down, which is a fair mindset to have. However you can't base all future trends and developments on the past, look at what Ryzen has done to Intel compared to where AMD was before with their processors? That was an incredible jump and just continued to skyrocket over time. It really is not inconceivable for AMD to knock it out of the park again.
Just to be clear, Big Navi/Navi 21/Radeon doing well and competing with 3080 won't take away your 3080, it will still exist, you can still buy it (once it launches for real) and it will still be a great performing card with good features. The difference is this time there will be real competition from AMD and a genuine alternative to Nvidia. Most people should be happy about that.