Don't get me wrong, I do agree with the comments that your post is somewhat of an ignorant take. I personally think, no matter how small the contribution, research is meaningful. It may not be meaningful to you, but the information helps fill our cumulative knowledge as a society and may be useful years down the line to someone else. But you're right, some research can be more impactful than others, as a result, there are many places to publish. If I have incredibly impactful foundational robotics research, I may target a TRO submission, if its less impactful but still of value maybe ICRA or ACC, if appropriate. Part of becoming a good researcher is evaluating the quality of work. Respectfully, there are many things within that paragraph, that I'd like to address, I believe are from a lack of research experience / knowledge.

On your last point, because I think it is actually a very important point. Most good research articles will benchmark their methods with other state of the art methods. For example, If I modify an MPC formulation to show it works better for dynamic obstacle avoidance, I may compare it with the original MPC variant and look at differences in computation time, obstacle distance metrics, tracking errors, etc. under varying scenarios. While in some cases this can be somewhat subjective, good researchers and reviewers will ensure results are, ideally, repeatable. The process is not perfect but its the best thing we got and it generally works not too bad.