Ideal condition speed vs congestion speed is a different thing- I'm not suggesting they don't face the standard scaling bottlenecks, but it is also true that under similar congestion conditions, the network will run faster as hardware improves.

SQL databases also run slower under high load, which is totally independent of faster hardware allowing for faster databases vs the baseline

Re: independent verification, I agree with you. It's not a great tradeoff. I'm not here to shill Solana as a panacea or anything of the sort, just pointing out clear inaccuracies from the OOP.