The culprit was unexpected. It wasn't about the bios or any of the usual settings. The culprit was the third party "speed enhancers" that had apparently set a cap on the CPU speed. I have Samsung magician, which has a performance setting, and I won't name the other applications that seem to insert their performance enhancers into the Windows power settings.
I deleted every one of those and reset the power settings to "balanced", and all is well. Now the CPU routinely runs at 4 GHz +.
Ryzen master is actually pretty good and I used it on numerous occasions trying to address this and on one occasion I used the Ryzen master manual setting, and the CPU ran at 4 GHz +. The thing is that the Ryzen 5000 CPUs auto clock on their own and you don't have to do anything unless you want to tweak it or do some kind of bench marking effort.
So the solution for me was to go into Windows power settings and delete all those other power settings except for the ones that Windows 10 provides by default.