Thanks for the numbers. Perhaps hype is not the right word. It is just interesting to see that some older hardware can still be used to achieve the state of the art performance, as the bottleneck may lie elsewhere.
It's always balancing bottlenecks. Here, the bottleneck is memory bandwidth, limiting to (more or less) 32 lanes of network; the platform has 128 lanes, so using more lanes than needed at a slower rate works and saves a bit of cost (probably). On their Intel Ice Lake test machine, that only had 64 lanes which is also a bottleneck, so they used Gen4 NVMe to get the needed storage bandwidth into the lanes available.