Um.. the model is tiny: https://github.com/thinking-machines-lab/manifolds/blob/main...
Here's the top model on DAWNBench - https://github.com/apple/ml-cifar-10-faster/blob/main/fast_c...
Trains for 15 epochs and it, like all the others is a 9 layer resnet.
In fact beating SOTA is often the least interesting part of an interesting paper and the SOTA-blind reviewers often use it as a gatekeeping device.
I probably should have made the 9-layer ResNet part more, front-and-center / central to my point.