I think you nailed it. And that would make sense and should be expected. 99.9% of the world's software (the training data) is several orders of magnitude away from max performance.

Another possible confusing thing for an LLM is that getting close to max doesn't necessarily require any "tricks." A big part of getting in the ballpark is just not doing anything you don't have to. If program A is faster than program B, most of the time is not some magic algorithm. It's that program A just did less stuff.