"Carefully and thoughtfully" is antithetical to the approach to benchmarks these days.

Maybe back when this was a scientific endeavor; not now when enormous, enormous amounts of capital are on the line. Along with an entire cult's chosen eschatology.

You can call it a cult but it’s several thousand skilled workers who know what they’re doing, by and large, most of whom have a PhD and know how science and statistics work. Benchmarks are incredibly hard, and any PR or comms department at any company is going to obviously want to make things as rosy as possible, but beneath this are earnest, expensive efforts to get good quality measurements. The better you can do this the better you can compete. If you want to make a modeling decision you run an ablation, and the quality of that decision is only as good as your measurements.