That article only comes into play if you are assigning more than 8 vcpus to a VM, this is when the underlying NUMA is shown to the VM, anything less ESXi will handle all of that for you, so what ever the socket to core config it only plays a part when you hit the 9vCPUs or above.
For both your examples specifically the first one I would suggest never allocate logical CPUs if you can help it. while it is saying it has 12 cores only 6 of them are real. Some workloads this may work well but if you assign a VM 12 vCPUs in this situation the guest thinks it has 12 full cores and will use them as such which can dramatically kill your performance. ESXi will use hyper threaded cores when its ok to do so and when it will not cause contention or performance problems.
For example 2 if you assign over 8vCPUs so 9 and up it is best to leave it 1 socket 1 core if licensing allows you too. otherwise matching the underlying NUMA is a must. But as the old saying goes more is not better, infact more can cause performance issues always assign a VM what it needs when its sharing the resources with other VMs, right sizing is key to a well running environment.
Cheers