Why's that? Wouldn't there be practical things to measure like picture quality, colour consistency, power usage, speaker quality, etc?

That stuff is measurement and is great, but "benchmarking" = measuring performance of features that don't belong in TV's.

I'm not following. The article talks about benchmarking "display brightness, quality, power consumption", and the cheating relates to peak luminance. Aren't they pretty normal features for TVs?

Response time is also very commonly benchmarked, and also belongs in TVs.

Did you read the article? It doesn't talk about any of those things

Unbiased reviews of consumer electronics is about the least dystopian thing I can think of.

... huh? We've been benchmarking TVs for decades. What am I missing?