It is extremely helpful to be able to estimate performance without building out a whole system. For instance 10ms vs 100ms vs 1s latency makes a world of differ

It is extremely helpful to be able to estimate performance without building out a whole system. For instance 10ms vs 100ms vs 1s latency makes a world of difference as far as what is possible and what component might be the bottleneck. Though, I agree that the “horse race” between several highly optimized and broadly similar libraries may be far less interesting