You don't have to take my word for it. The ClickHouse CTO (who opened the original removal PR) updated his post after reviewing our explanation and our fully open-source v0.4-beta submission[0]:

> We clarified with the author - while the binary had signs of optimization for specific benchmark queries, we have a reason to believe that the actual runtime didn't use per-query kernels... The usage of a query condition cache and cached statistics per granule is legitimate. The submission of a closed source preview version fine-tuned for benchmark was shady nevertheless. However, the new submission #2751 should move us post all the concerns.

Submitting an incomplete, closed-source preview build was a mistake on my part. Since then, we open-sourced a new version with full SQL support, ClickHouse merged it back into ClickBench, and the new version actually runs 7% faster (geomean) than the preview build that was removed.

[0] https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench/pull/2165