Even at the time of announcement M5 was not the fastest chip. Not even on single core benchmark where apple usually shines due to the design choice of having fewer but more powerful cores (AMD for examples does the opposite). For example on geekbench Core i9-14900KS and Core Ultra 9 285K were faster.

The distance was not huge, maybe 3%. You can obviously pick and choose your benchmarks until you find one where "your" CPU happens to be the best.