You shouldn't use the mean when doing benchmarking. Better to use the median or fastest time. Lots of random things can happen on computers (usually in the OS) that can result in some operation taking 1000x longer.
How do you expect someone to justify a statement that's not true? I suppose you could say that it's a fair characterization of a basic decision tree but that doesn't describe modern ML methods.
That's not a fair characterization. These contractors are mostly used for quality assurance. Once you've trained your model (which is not just if statements), you might you send a few thousand examples to raters to judge the true quality of your model.