The disclaimer at the top of the benchmark section - https://github.com/FastVM/minivm#benchmarks - seemed pretty reasonable to me.

It's very clear that microbenchmarks don't tell the whole story, and that whole application benchmarks to give more real results will be desirable later.

I mean, I agree these benchmarks don't mean that much except for being a useful way to verify that the core code is working and reasonably performant - but they're up front about that fact so calling it 'benchmark-gaming' seems a trifle unfair.