You're conflating lmarena ELO scores.

Qwen actually has a higher ELO there. The top Pareto frontier open models are:

  model                        |elo  |price
  qwen3.5-397b-a17b            |1449 |$1.85
  glm-4.7                      |1443 | 1.41
  deepseek-v3.2-exp-thinking   |1425 | 0.38
  deepseek-v3.2                |1424 | 0.35
  mimo-v2-flash (non-thinking) |1393 | 0.24
  gemma-3-27b-it               |1365 | 0.14
  gemma-3-12b-it               |1341 | 0.11
  gpt-oss-20b                  |1318 | 0.09
  gemma-3n-e4b-it              |1318 | 0.03

What Gemma seems to have done is dominate the extreme cheap end of the market. Which IMO is probably the most important and overlooked segment

That Pareto plot doesn't seem include the Gemma 4 models anywhere (not just not at the frontier), likely because pricing wasn't available when the chart was generated. At least, I can't find the Gemma 4 models there. So, not particularly relevant until it is updated for the models released today.