Sounds very reasonable. In the blog post about 20s were shaved off by assuming we don't need complicated string parsing. An of the shelf library can't make that assumption so they will always have to pay the extra cost.
True in general but some (especially libs aimed at larger datasets processed in batch) are taking advantage of benchmarks like this to do things like:
Try the fast way, if it works great
Try the slow way, if above fails
This makes the slow path 2x slower at worst (and you can advise to always use the slow way with optional params) but the fast path can be 10x faster
