Sorry, but that's not correct. Sure, I tend to be sceptical when it comes to L&P and his updates, but the issue with duplicated renders had been mentioned and pointed out months ago when he's released 0.155+0.160. There had been several people noticing it, here on F95 aswell as on Patreon. The reason was simply because of the huge delay caused by animations back then, L&P's statements and the results we got, which raised some eyebrows as it seemed like the actual unique render count dropped considerably. Some theories have it that it's because he was lying about having someone creating his animations, so reducing his work on unique renders bought more time for him to work on his new addition to the game.
Sure, you can call it nitpicking, but after the constant downward spiral over the years, it's hard to see the positive. You are right, he's slightly faster compared to the previous 3 updates, which I've also mentioned, but he's still slower compared to 0.150 from last year. Let's just hope he can atleast keep this pace for now, because I'm not expecting much in terms of development speed at this point. I'm a pirate for AWAM anyways, so expecting anything might sound a bit entitled, but you get what I mean.