The support status for Windows 7 is complicated. To force people to "upgrade" to Windows 10, MS basically cut support early, and in an aggressive manner, by blocking updates from being installed on newer processors, and working with Intel to not provide Windows 7 drivers for newer processors. This means hardware with official driver support ended much earlier, compared to XP. Patching the OS might also be necessary.
A Zhihu answer reached the same conclusions as I did, although the answer is a bit outdated.
The AMD CPU is more powerful.
The big.LITTLE-like hybrid architecture used since Alder Lake (12th gen Intel Core) received limited support in Windows 10 and full support in Windows 11 (source). This effectively means a cut-off for Windows 8.1 and older, as they will not be running optimally. Therefore, I consider trying to run Windows 7 on 12th gen and later pointless.
The last generation of CPUs with official driver support is 10th gen Cascade Lake-X CPUs, the best of which is i9-10980XE. 11th gen has no i9/X/Extreme CPUs. i9-10980XE outperforms i7-11900K.
The ASRock X299 OC Formula motherboard supports all LGA 2066 non-Xeon CPUs, which can be considered alternatives.
Comet Lake-S (best: i9-10900K, socket: LGA 1200, chipset: Z490/Z590) doesn't support Windows 7. Coffee Lake-R and Coffee Lake-S (best: i9-9900KS / i7-8086K, socket: LGA 1151-2) does support Windows 7 but only with the B365 chipset.
From a now-locked forum:
AMD didn't follow Intel, and kept using traditional designs. As a result, the official driver support cut-off is way more reasonable.
The last generation of chipsets to have official Windows 7 drivers is X470/B450. The best CPU in this generation is 5950X.
However, many people on Reddit say that 5950X actually performs worse than 5800X3D when gaming, despite having higher benchmark scores; 5950X is better-suited for productivity workloads such as video editing. In addition, a new model, 5700X3D, was released in 2024, that only performs slightly worse than 5800X3D but can be bought for "about half the price". 5900XT, another model released in 2024, doesn't make sense.
According to GamersNexus, X470 is basically the same board as X370, so X370 can be considered a cheaper alternative.
Modded drivers (ACPI, USB3) by canonkong are available for X570/B550 and X670/B670, allowing 7950X to be used. Wi-Fi still can't be used though.
According to another Reddit post, 7950X3D "[has] issues reaching their potential because a chipset driver is necessary to get full performance".
The RX 6950 XT is between the RTX 3090 and the RTX 3090 Ti in performance, but is cheaper than the RTX 3090.