This counterpoint doesn't address the issue, and I would argue that it is partially bad faith.

Yes, making it to the test center is significantly harder, but in fact the humans could have solved it from their home PC instead, and performed the exact same. However, if they were given the same test as the LLMs, forbidden from input beyond JSON, they would have failed. And although buying robots to do the test is unfeasible, giving LLMs a screenshot is easy.

Without visual input for LLMs in a benchmark that humans are asked to solve visually, you are not comparing apples to apples. In fact, LLMs are given a different and significantly harder task, and in a benchmark that is so heavily weighted against the top human baseline, the benchmark starts to mean something extremely different. Essentially, if LLMs eventually match human performance on this benchmark, this will mean that they in fact exceed human performance by some unknown factor, seeing as human JSON performance is not measured.

Personally, this hugely decreased my enthusiasm for the benchmark. If your benchmark is to be a North star to AGI, labs should not be steered towards optimizing superhuman JSON parsing skills. It is much more interesting to steer them towards visual understanding, which is what will actually lead the models out into the world.