She has been exceptionally good at creating a narrative IMO. I agree that her actual accomplishments are less clear. At Stanford, a person in her position gets added as last author to all her students’ work so her citation count is very skewed due to that. I’ve not heard from anyone in the field (past students, CV researchers) about her capabilities, and I’ve heard loads about other PIs like Chris Re, Percy Liang, etc.

Also, I hate to say this but when I was at Stanford there was a distinct sense of promoting women in AI and she was asked to speak in or co teach courses/lectures for what seemed to be that reason alone. For example the course on “AI for human thriving” and such.