All my fellow cryptography hobbyists, what's your view on the newly standardized Ascon?

From reading the papers and what was the aim of NIST Lightweight Cryptography competition that it won, I got the impression that it was supposed to be more resilient to side channel attacks, use less memory, execute faster than anything else standardized when run on low end devices. I.e. what we all generally work with. But only go from generally 256 bit keys to 128 bit keys.

But from my testing vs Chacha{8,12,20}Poly1305s it seems that Ascon really only beats Chacha in code size (and that by a lot). Else it's

Ascon vs Chacha
- 128 vs 256 bit keys
- 128 vs 96 bit nonce
- block vs stream cipher
- both don't to table lookup and are mainly xor/rotate based (so better side-channel resistance)

And then execution time for encryption:

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