For the general case the ideal is an eviction policy that adapts to fit the given workload. Unfortunately adaptivity is not a very well explored area so most policies have heuristic settings that default to work well in a target range of workloads, but this has to be tuned for others. In this and the author's other paper, S3-FIFO, their lower hit rates with TinyLFU turned out to be due to the implementation. When running it with Caffeine, a productionized version that adds hill climbing and jitter, it had equivalent hit rates [1]. That cache is pretty robust across a wide range of workloads, but also much more complicated to implement. I'd really like to see more research on adaptivity because I think all policies are converging on similar structures and goals, but self-tuning is still an error prone art.
[1] https://github.com/Yiling-J/theine/issues/21#issuecomment-18...
But I think this might also not be too helpful overall. I think in many cases there is an obvious choice depending on how and for what the cache is used. And then there are caches that have more unpredictable access patterns, a file system cache might be a good candidate, experiencing the access patterns of all the different applications.
In that case there is probably no best choice as several applications with different access patterns concurrently hit the cache. Or if there is a best choice, it might change very quickly as different applications or components of applications execute. In such a scenario it seems more promising to me to try to categorize the access patterns on a per source basis and treating them accordingly instead of trying to find one best policy for all sources combined.
On the other hand something like this might quickly become prohibitively expensive.