> The best benchmark is the community vibe in the weeks following a release.

True, just be careful what community you use as a vibe-check. Most of the mainstream/big ones around AI and LLMs basically have influence campaigns run against them, are made of giant hive-minds that all think alike and you need to carefully asses if anything you're reading is true or not, and votes tend to make it even worse.

I generally check LM Arena as well as which models have had the most weekly tokens on openrouter