My main pet peeve with lighthouse is the "Eliminate render-blocking resource". It suggest inlining critical CSS and defer the rest. However, in my experience with limited testing group, there are no perceivable different at all.
I also have way too many web site that origin summary and field data shows all green, but the lab data is almost always in either yellow or red.
There are many, many research and case studies [3] correlating improved website performance to improved business metrics (such as conversions).
Google Search has also signaled that the Core Web Vitals will become a ranking signal [4].
Disclosure: I work on Lighthouse and web.dev
[1] https://web.dev/how-to-measure-speed/#lab-data-vs-field-data
[2] https://web.dev/vitals/#core-web-vitals
[4] https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-ex...
Helps push general performance and best practise forward. And its communicated in a way non techie's understand.
Almost too easily - have had some 'consultants' run 'reports' that are just lighthouse re-badged, coupled with no technical understanding of what the action points mean, or why they may not be suitable for the platform / workflow in use.
But for the most part it's a positive tool, thanks!
It's not as important as your page rendering correctly, or finding the cure of cancer. It is however a nice goal to strive for regarding performance, encapsulated in an easy to use scoring tool.
Its results might be arbitrary, but for some industries, when Google says "jump", you say "how high?".