For better or worse I care deeply about my lighthouse scores, and I've been tempted by the "evil tips" in the article. I try my best to control my results by using both Pagespeed Insights[1] and WebpageTest[2].
That being said my worst scores are always the result of a reliance on third party tools like Zendesk - which is why I'm so excited about efforts to load third party scripts outside the main thread like partytown[3]