If Bounty determines how good Luffy is compared to the other YCs, then what does that make Katakuri compared to Queen? Bounty doesn't just magically start mattering when it projects your agenda. Beating Katakuri was one of the many reasons why Luffy was termed the 5th Emperor. And anyone with a half-working brain knows half of those were exaggerated lies. Imagine, using that as hype to elevate Katakuri when he was literally termed as just another commander of Big Mom alongside Cracker of all things.
How about we look at Luffy before his eventual power-ups?
King at least has the excuse for not being able to utilize his innate abilities and he's still recovering from the previous battle.
Well, if you use that brain for a bit, then you'd know your CoC is relative to your overall strength and that Luffy and Yamato have different baselines before they acquired CoC. Luffy was already hitting the YC1 class before he acquired Adv.CoA, which made him one step closer to being a top-tier. So Luffy was already in close proximity to Yamato even before he mastered CoC coating, and that made him go well beyond Yamato.
King is far stronger than Luffy before he acquired Adv.CoA or adv.COC, so if you give him those power-ups, then he'd naturally hit higher levels than the person that was weaker than him before the power-ups. That's as simple as 1+2<1.5+2.
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That's the rationale. If they lose to an admiral, then they're more pathetic than that character who lost to WCI Luffy some 150 chapters ago. The funny part is, these guys think they're qualified enough to mock others for having bad takes.