That seems awfully speculative without at least some anecdata to back it up.

Sure, go get some.

This isn't the first open-weight LLM to be released. People tend to get a feel for this stuff over time.

Let me give you some more baseless speculation: Based on the quality of the 3.5 27B and the 3.6 35B models, this model is going to absolutely crush it.

Not at all, I actually run ~30B dense models for production and have tested out 5090/3090 for that. There are gotchas of course, but the speed/quality claims should be roughly there.