Maybe, on the other hand: the link you posted was to a benchmark using kitty 0.31, since then it had an all new escape code parser using SIMD vector CPU instructions that sped it up by 2x. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/changelog/#cheetah-speed

I do think this wasn't excluded by the benchmarks from the link I posted

Edit: actually it was, cheetah seems to come with 0.33, not 0.31, and benchmarks were done in 0.31. It would be interesting to run them with 0.33.