From a technical POV I also question that contemporary encoders still optimize for those three tracks (which means any encoder but the ISO reference code and ve

From a technical POV I also question that contemporary encoders still optimize for those three tracks (which means any encoder but the ISO reference code and very close derivatives like 8Hz). IIRC LAME which was used for this project, replaced the entire psychoacoustic modelling code (which is possible to do since MP3-the-format only cares about frequency bands and buckets, not about what the encoder does to them), and they likely tuned their new model to larger, more diverse sets of samples and ears.