This is not a theoretical benefit - it is a very practical benefit, especially for object-oriented code with lots of indirection, virtual calls and dynamically

This is not a theoretical benefit - it is a very practical benefit, especially for object-oriented code with lots of indirection, virtual calls and dynamically loaded code. The reason it is not visible in microbenchmarks is because microbenchmarks are small and usually avoid indirection as much as possible, and even if there exist some, the code is all in one file so a static compiler can figure out all the call targets properly.