Beyond that I wish the article had explain a bit better why it chose these "better-than-std" crates. I'm actually using all the std variants in my projects, I'm curious to know if I'm missing out or if I just happen not to hit on their limitations.
At least for parking_lot, its README has a long list with its advantages over std: https://github.com/Amanieu/parking_lot/blob/master/README.md
That being said since they're drop-in replacements for the most part I suppose I could just try to rebuild my project with this crate and see if I notice a difference performance-wise.
With crossbeam for example, you can hit roadblocks with std since their channels are MPSC, whereas crossbeam supports MPMC channels (and is faster than std in every meaningful measurement last I checked).
Reading the description it almost seemed too good to be true but if it's indeed objectively better in basically every situation I should probably give it a try.
Rust leaves a lot of improvements to its standard library to the community, so these improvements start off as separate libraries for faster iteration. The most recent example I remember is the hashbrown crate replacing the standard HashMap.