What else can people do? Try the dozen of commercial offerings themselves? Okay I suppose that's doable, you task one engineer to try them one by one for one month. But then the next model drops and you start all over again...

But then what about local models? You have hundreds of variations to test yourself. It's simply not doable unless it's your full time hobby.

You need benchmarks to at least separate the cream from the crop, so you're left with only a few choices to test yourself.