[gwd]

Did he "struggle with time", or did he just work harder to find the move a chess engine would choose?

Basically in every single stat, Ding plays more like the chess engines; and overall he was able to capitalize better on an advantage and recover better from a disadvantage than Gukesh. Just looking at the data, I think it would be reasonable to conclude that Gukesh won mostly by luck: that the more probable outcome was that Ding didn't blunder in the final game.

On the other hand, Ding isn't a chess engine; he takes longer and gets tired sooner than a chess engine. One aspect of human chess is management of both time and intellectual energy, so there's certainly an argument to be made that the extra effort Ding put in to play more like a chess engine wasn't the optimal strategy for a human.

[Etheryte]

I think this misses the forest for the trees. At the end of the day, if you're competing to be the world champion in chess, your goal isn't to play as close to the engine as possible, it's to win games. If you play with 100% accuracy, but lose on time, you don't get to be the champion.

[pertymcpert]

You're discounting the fact that Gukesh could have also sacrificed good time management and spent more compute time on his moves for precision. The fact that he didn't do that doesn't mean he won on luck.