I think Cerny just did his job as a Sony employee. When Xbox engineers said to Digital Foundry in 2013 that GDDR5 would have put them in an uncomfortable design position for the Xbox One, they got rightfully laughed at by every reader and countless people on this forum. When Cerny states that unprecedented overclocking is the best performance solution going forward because that's how you keep very performant GPUs cool (I'm paraphrasing), it should draw scepticism as well.
I concede that the article is wrongfully saying that Cerny directly compared the PS5 to the XSX. He did not. His listeners did and perceived his innuendos. Without Cerny's presentation I am not sure that the Crytek guy goes on record to downplay large GPUs and then retract it.
Of course we should be skeptical of what we're being told. But it's another thing to automatically assume that people are being dishonest or putting words in their mouth.
And again I haven't seen anyone saying PS5's clocks make it more powerful than XSX. I've only seen people saying it narrows the gap, but there's still a gap. This is why it'd be very interesting to see a poll because we're both perceiving things so different.
I wasn't on this forum during the XBO reveal, so I don't know how the reaction was, but their listed benefits for going with DDR3 with eSRAM were sound, however they also did not admit the downside of the setup, which is that it'd be more of a challenge to use.
I'm not sure where you gathered that Cerny said overclocking was the best way to keep a GPU cool though, but if you mean the whole variable clocks thing, again, if he's so dishonest, why would he mention the downside of it having to downclock in certain instances at all?