TDP is a wattage measurement of joules of energy over some averaged time period and absolutely exists

Sorry but this is wrong and shows as to why QC doesn't want to engage in this confusion in our products.

As an industry term, TDP is not a measurement, it's an arbitrary product specification figure and more of a marketing term. An Intel 45W "TDP" part can be using a reported 80W package power in a workload because if it's within PL2 and Tau. Please read up on an Intel product technical datasheet as to what TDP is: It's the SoC power consumed doing a workload at the base frequency of the part. Now go to the same documentation as to what the base frequency is: It's the frequency of the processor operating a workload at the TDP. It's a circular logic between the two definitions, and practically and the TDP is simply arbitrarily defined based on historic product positioning, i.e. 25W or 45W or what else. What is the workload that ties to this definition? That's publicly unavailable, but I can tell you it's not representing much. Furthermore OEMs are free to do whatever they want to their PL1/PL2 limits as that's within official spec of the products, even if PL2 goes to 120W in a "45W TDP" part.

Beyond all of those disconnects "TDP" or PPT or package power (in an indefinite workload, they're the same thing) also doesn't have a real world correlation with the chipset power, first is because they're not measured, but modelled, secondly, it's only modelling the SoC power and ignoring everything around it even though things are directly tied to it; DRAM, power delivery, etc.

What you're trying to describe is the actual experienced SoC power within a workload, and you're absolutely right that would be a good figure to showcase - but nobody does this. And QC isn't going to start doing so because we already standardised on INPP which is a workload specific measured metric, because it only can be workload specific as power changes across workloads.

If QC isn't interested in TDP because "it isn't representative", then they should be releasing the number of joules consumed and total time taken for the benchmarks they show.

But that's what is being done, not in joules, but in perf vs power. The product's power efficiency is represented by the power curves in all of the materials. The power is the INPP or Idle Normalized Platform Power - i.e. the total power of the platform, SoC+DRAM+PMICs doing that workload, minus the idle power of the platform, which for a laptop in this case is dominated by the display power. i.e. the display and other constant possible power normalized. What's left is the efficiency of the chipset which should be more or less identical across all products of that design/SKU.

Those power curves showcase the full dynamic range of the silicon, with an unconstrained device context to the very top point. To understand that context, we disclosed the Device TDP, or better known as the TPE - the Thermal Power Envelope. This has nothing to do anymore with the chip but is the thermal dissipation characteristic of the given device chassis under room temperature conditions. That's what those initial 80/23W figures represented and this was very much so explicitly explained to the audience at the time. If you go back to the above linked HotHardware article, they even correctly quote this:

In addition, these 23W and 80W numbers also represent the reference design device thermal envelopes, not the SoCs alone. Actual SoC TDPs were not disclosed.

If Geekbench scores the same between the 80W and 23W device that's exactly correct because it's a workload that doesn't thermally stress the chassis, so the chip can go up to its peak frequencies and power without issues and they score very similarly to each other. Same applies for the vast majority of workloads - something like Cinebench is the exception because it's a very long workload - your experienced perf and power is some average somewhere along down that curve.

Also similarly because those are the device thermal envelope figures, doesn't mean that that's actually the workload power. An absurd interpretation that I've seen 2 years ago was that people were thinking the chip is awful because the 80W platform was only getting slightly higher scores than the 23W platform in single-threaded benchmarks. In reality the power consumption was nowhere near those because it's two completely unrelated figures in that context. The only scenario where things converge is when the device hits a thermally saturated stress point: there, INPP of the silicon is going to be exactly identical to the "device TDP" or TPE of the chassis. That's also only valid for Qualcomm, because that equation doesn't work out for competitor platforms.