Nice

Of course they could be better, but while you dig what is happening, most people will not or even can't not dig in to all apps/systems/distros. While i understand some kernel options or apps , others are totally unknown for me.

Phoronix benchmarks makes no clain or change, install the system and test... that is the result. if you do not do anything else, expect those results! if you dig in to it, you can finetune more ... but on other end, you also see that "optimized distros" can have much better results in some items, but almost no difference on others, so you also know if it is even worth investing time trying to optimize something or not. For many apps/games, is not worth the time to optimize it more to get 5% or less more performance (and like O3, risk of getting more bugs)

A benchmark that tries to optimize every single app is not only lot of work, but also no system and workload is the same, the best option for one setup may not be the best one for another, so that would be always a problem for someone.

As for hardware and distros/kernel evolution over time, they are actually very useful, we can see how a new hardware is performing and even postpone buying one a few months, where you get better performance and possible better price also.
or how much updating the distro may help in some setups.

finally the news, yes, he tends to overreact to some news or rumors, but it got much better with time and for one men show, he actually track way many projects and report back when something happens, so you know things that usually don't show up in other places

So yes, phoronix is not perfect, it could be better in some areas, but is good enough, specially being a one men show and not aa team of people. Many of the issues would probably be mitigated if there was more people working as different opinions and reviewing would catch most of the issues or too personal opinions