The pictured ships provide benchmarks for considering an ideal destroyer in each period. Many of these examples are not necessarily the best destroyers of their generation. The comparison uses them to ask which capabilities would make a destroyer ideal for the conditions of its own era.
Notable Point · 4:21-4:38
Benchmark ships frame the ideal destroyer
The ships shown are period benchmarks chosen to explain what an ideal destroyer required, not declarations that each pictured design was the best of its era.