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They drastically changed how belts work a few years ago, but "common knowledge" is slow to change.
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-176

Uncompressed belts used to be a huge factor, and arms taking from moving belts chased the items. That's why they advised using a splitter to make a stub branch which was fully compressed for the arm to grab from.

Now uncompressed belts don't take much more time than fully compressed, and splitters now cost more time than taking directly from the belt.

Just found this... I think this FFF is the source of the compressed better than uncompressed hypothesis: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-176

My interpretation of that is that there will be no difference between compressed or uncompressed performance except in cases where a belt starts to back up, and even then it is just in adjusting the distance between items as they compress. Which seems to line up exactly with what you said in your original comment!

It does make me wonder whether consuming the whole belt, rather than letting it back up, is better or worse for performance. My gut says letting it backup would be better as inserter hunting I would guess is more intensive than adjusting the belt/item details.

Cool, thanks!

(I googled <factorio eei> and found this FFF that defined it as "energy/enjoyment/investment value," and I thought, "that can't be right.")