I think it really depends on what you do and where you live. I have access to high-speed internet, have (way too) many tabs open at all times and use various web applications. Someone who's just reading the news and social media behind a DSL line will have a completely different experience.
I rarely encounter loading times that are caused by network traffic. Some servers are slow to reach, but most pages load almost instantaneously. Perhaps that's why things that I see Firefox lose to Chrome at are noticeable to me but not to many others.
The benchmark itself is not an indicator of what the average user will do in their browser, but it does show that Firefox is objectively slower in certain areas. Whether those areas bother you is another question, of course.
Firefox becoming completely unresponsive happens to me more than I like. This is due to a difference in architecture; Firefox spawns a process for every CPU thread and divides the work whereas Chrome spawns a new thread for every page. When a badly written page slows down to a crawl (i.e. leaving Reddit open for more than two minutes), the tabs sharing that process become unresponsive. On multiple occasions I've had to kill tabs that were shown as "loading" because other tabs stopped functioning if they lost the render process lottery. It's not as extreme as people claim and it's certainly not as bad as it was five years ago, but Firefox does have weird freezes and bugs that Chrome seemingly just doesn't have.
On the other hand, I'm convinced part of the reason for slowdowns and problems is that Firefox tries to strip away a lot of the privacy invasions that have become the norm on the modern web. I'll gladly keep taking those slowdowns, but even outside those there's still a lot of work that can be done to bring Firefox on par with Chrome.
I rarely encounter loading times that are caused by network traffic. Some servers are slow to reach, but most pages load almost instantaneously. Perhaps that's why things that I see Firefox lose to Chrome at are noticeable to me but not to many others.
The benchmark itself is not an indicator of what the average user will do in their browser, but it does show that Firefox is objectively slower in certain areas. Whether those areas bother you is another question, of course.
Firefox becoming completely unresponsive happens to me more than I like. This is due to a difference in architecture; Firefox spawns a process for every CPU thread and divides the work whereas Chrome spawns a new thread for every page. When a badly written page slows down to a crawl (i.e. leaving Reddit open for more than two minutes), the tabs sharing that process become unresponsive. On multiple occasions I've had to kill tabs that were shown as "loading" because other tabs stopped functioning if they lost the render process lottery. It's not as extreme as people claim and it's certainly not as bad as it was five years ago, but Firefox does have weird freezes and bugs that Chrome seemingly just doesn't have.
On the other hand, I'm convinced part of the reason for slowdowns and problems is that Firefox tries to strip away a lot of the privacy invasions that have become the norm on the modern web. I'll gladly keep taking those slowdowns, but even outside those there's still a lot of work that can be done to bring Firefox on par with Chrome.