even without going too-CISC it can make sense to have instructions for popular use cases
e.g. ARM has special instructions for optimal numeric operations in JavaScript: https://developer.arm.com/documentation/dui0801/h/A64-Floating-point-Instructions/FJCVTZS
and I thought I'd read something about custom instructions in Apple Silicon to optimise virtualisation (i.e. translation of x86_64 executables) but I can't find a source for that, maybe that secret sauce is not in the instruction set