I assume you never got a nicely wrapped gift as a kid...did your parents just throw some socks on your face?!
I was just glad to even get a gift most of the time.
A nice presentation is a big part of how you perceive anything, goes for food, rolexes, persons, and also CPUs, and everything else.
In the case of food, luxury items, and people, the item itself is what we, for lack of a better word, consume. You don't "consume" the packaging.
But a CPU goes in a socket and gets covered by a heat sink, never to be seen again until I have to repaste it.
Even animals go to extreme lengths to look good to potential mates so it's an universal truth that presentation matters.
And there are plenty of animals that don't care about physical appearances.
Good thing has to look good.
And I believe excess hardware packaging doesn't add anything to its value. I mean look at Apple. Practically all of their products come in a boring, cuboid box with the picture of the product on it and some text. From what I've bothered to read about their packaging, people find the
experience of opening their packaging valuable.
Sure, people might've found trapezoidal game boxes, the plastic case Threadrippers came in, or Intel's polyhedron boxes to be eye catching, but does it really matter at the end of the day? If people can get a hard-on for opening a boring cuboid packaging from Apple products, then that shows we don't necessarily need unorthodox packaging.
EDIT: Another thing that I'm finding hilarious about people whining about this is the i9-13900 isn't even Intel's most expensive product. Intel has processors costing $10,000+ And while the end user may not get to unbox them, I'm pretty sure they don't come in gold plated, diamond encrusted boxes for the system builder to ooh and awe at.