This definitely feels like Cerny's design philosophy, and it's a pretty smart one. Look at the wonders it's done for PS4. These wilder spec rumors for PS5 would be more credible if Kutaragi were still at Sony, but those days ended over a decade ago.
Also it's kind of funny to see all these wild power fantasies playing out for PS5, but not XSX. Partly that's because we simply know more about XSX, but even when we were in the dark on both systems relatively equally, the range of power fantasy was easily towards PS5.
And I'm gonna be fair here; that was also how it played out with XBO and PS4 during a lot of 2012 when spec rumors were going around for those systems. A lot of those were giving MS the edge, but MS had the unfortunate duty of the more damaging rumors coming out near the end of that year and into 2013, then getting confirmed at the reveal.
I don't think Sony has any really damaging rumors or features planned otherwise we'd be hearing about those by now (I could be wrong tho), but at this point it definitely feels like TF-wise PS5 is going to sit somewhere around 9.2-9.7 TF, and that's very good. You look back at all the rumors for a system launch last year, look at a lot of the departures (some of which came out of nowhere, like Shawn Layden), look at planning for an affordable and fast transition (aka $399; which they're still alluding to with things like "we want to make this the fastest adaptation yet"), look at how "that" leak was deleted almost as soon as it went up (and remains one of the only leaks where that's happened, if not the only one), even the more recent leaks still sticking with a 40CU design seemingly, and it all just starts to add up.
What's more wild to me is how some are thinking 9.2-9.7 is somehow a death blow; it really isn't. We're not going to see these systems maxed out at launch anyway, because it'll take time for devs to pour resources into development big enough to do so. You're still going to get some really impressive looking games from both sides, in fact you're going to get instances of some PS5 1st-party looking better than XSX 1st-party, and some XSX 1st-party looking better than PS5 1st-party. Across the board the systems in terms of 1st party will likely balance out in terms of awesome graphics.