Is “Fastest Growing“ overrated ?

I've given up on the mainstream (media, VCs, business folks in general) actually attempting to share useful benchmarks for ranking companies. Everybody gets excited about how much money a company raised. So what? Spending money isn't a business- making money is. But, not enough people want to read an article about how a companies got their CAC:LTV ratios to improve massively, I guess. I mentally rank businesses higher that have no funding, random financial stats such as product or profit margins or low CAC and high LTV numbers (etc), applied creativity to get measurable and beneficial business outcomes, and interesting business models and methods. Instead, we rank billion dollar companies highly that still haven't figured out basic things like profitability, but the investors of the previous round managed to get other investors in on the company at an arbitrarily higher valuation.