I so deeply wish for a set of benchmarks that accepted only idiomatic, standard code that a slightly above average developer would plausibly write.

Pretty much every set of benchmarks out there is ruined by monstrous unrealistic code that squeezes out 5% more performance than actually well written code.

As a side note, one flaw of TechEmpower benchmarks is that to my knowledge they use the original "wrk" tool, which only supports HTTP 1.0 and is sensitive to "coordinated omission" [0]. This means it ends up being biased in favor of web frameworks that implement specific optimizations or have specific behaviors that aren't actually useful in a production context.

[0] https://github.com/giltene/wrk2