This is definitely true. A common "blueprint" for articles in applied CS is first they propose a "novel" algorithm. This algorithm may be very similar to an exi

This is definitely true. A common "blueprint" for articles in applied CS is first they propose a "novel" algorithm. This algorithm may be very similar to an existing algorithm and in many cases is identical to one. Then they benchmark the algorithm and shows that it performs better on some metrics than existing solutions. These benchmarks are often quite poor, and if you vary them a little, the purported performance increases vanishes.