I am afraid that merely a citation reference doesn't tell the whole story. I guess someone has to dig into those papers and implement them and then use real world data to test and see, right?

If anyone does want to dig in to the papers, a friend and I made a discussion platform for research. I've added all the papers in Tyler's talk as well as two he recommended on Twitter to a list here: https://www.projectcredo.com/briankung/server-load-balancing

I have zero background in academic computer science, so it may take me a while to understand even one of these papers.

If a paper has something better than JIQ it should already contain benchmark results, so you could pick the paper with the best claimed performance and just implement that. The usual disclaimers about academic work apply.