M1 has 16bn transistors, M4 has 28bn. Increasing the core count is useful for some applications (particularly GPU cores), but there are still many critical workloads that are gated by single-threaded performance.
Moore's law was never about single threaded performance, it was about transistor count and transistor cost, but people misunderstood it when single threaded performance was increasing exponentially.
You have brought a lot of your own assumptions to that reading. OP asked if doubling or tripling core count counted as keeping up with Moore’s law. I pointed out that in the case of the M series (the topic of the thread), regardless of core count, transistor count did not double or triple.