I'm at the front of the line, I maintain an app with integrations with all 4 major providers and llama.cpp with 4 built-in models. Yesterday, I was one of the, if not the, first to get it integrated and flag to model makers they had the wrong chat template embedded.

That's a lengthy way of saying, contra what you imply, I have practical experience & understand this stuff intimately.

I agree with your opinion re: it's unlikely LLaMA 3 70B beats all private models, but think your way of relaying it, claiming there's widespread gaming of it by advocates for open models, is obviously incorrect, and adds more confusion rather than reducing it.