If you look at Benzema in a bit more detail it paints a more intuitive picture.
While he's scored a boatload of goals, he hasn't been scoring at an exceptional rate: Ruud, di Stéfano, Eusébio, Puskás, Muller and others scored at a much higher rate. For example if Ruud played as many CL games as Benzema, he'd have scored over 100 goals at that rate.
While Benzema was exceptionally good at a young age, it is one of the dominant themes of this generation that players are playing at their peak for longer.
And due to the nature of super clubs, if you're playing for one you're more or less guaranteed to play 5+ CL games a season: the last time Benzema didn't was when he was 19. For contrast, Gerd Muller was 27 when he first played 5+ European Cup games in a season (naturally he scored 11 goals in 6 games).
And due to the expanded nature of the competition, it's much easier to play a lot of games: Benzema had 5 seasons where he played 10+ games, which amounts to more CL matches than Muller ever played, while Muller had just one season when he managed 10 games.
And we're in a high scoring era: 2019-20 was the highest scoring European Cup since 1976. It wasn't an aberration either, in the last 5 seasons there's been an average of over 3 goals per game. During Ruud's time with us it was 2.6, during van Basten's time with Milan it was 2.7, even during Muller's time which is associated with no-mark Eastern European teams it was only 2.96 goals per game...and again because of the nature of superclubs, the goals have been oriented much more towards their strikers rather than the opposition's.
So more games, more goals, and more skewed results create a slightly misleading statistical story. The likes of di Stéfano, Muller, Eusébio, Puskás would easily have hit over 100 goals if they managed over 100 games like Benzema, Lewandowski or Zlatan.
ffs the condescension mixed in with the analysis is incredible.
