You seem fixated on this interpretation that the speed in biathlon is super low, you've gone to this as a default argument several times. Denise Herrmann has some days when she's peerless, but she has other days when she really isn't all that exciting a skier. Did you watch the Mixed Relay last week, when Svetlana Mironova skied around her like she was a mobile chicane on the final lap of her leg and then put 10 seconds into her in under 2km? Her career average course time rank is 4,45, and this season she is a clear step slower than she has been the last two seasons (the Mass Start two days ago was her first fastest course time all season). She also dramatically improved her skiing performance after her first year in biathlon, presumably after putting the majority of her focus onto learning to shoot in the first season. Is she a more competitive skier among biathletes than she would be among cross-country skiers? Of course she is. The top skiers in XC have no reason to do biathlon, but in countries that don't have the budget supremacy of Norway, Sweden and Russia, if you aren't the very top tier, you can win on a good day in biathlon, you can top out at about 7th in XC. And that is borne out by the difference in the number of flags at the business end of biathlon compared to XC where, outside of the major championships, the relays - probably the most popular discipline in biathlon - are all but dead because all the talent is concentrated into 2-3 countries and the others don't see the value in trying to compete with that. But the belief that any reasonably good cross-country skier could demolish the biathlon ranks with 7/10 is outmoded. Denise herself has a career total of 79% - nearly an average 8/10 - and she isn't destroying the field. She's 11th in the Cup standings this year, has been 12th, 8th and 3rd in her 3 full seasons, and has 7 individual wins in 88 starts. She scores a top 10 in just over a third of her races, but she misses the top 40 10% of the time. She has set the best course time in around 30% of those races, so if you compare to her XC days, it compares fairly well to the amount of the time she spent between 6th and 15th in World Cup events. She was also especially good in the Team Sprint, which is probably the most comparable to biathlon in terms of its physical demands, in that it is several short stints of racing with brief respites in the middle. Until this season, her ski performances as a biathlete were actually improving year on year, how much of that is influenced by retirements of strong skiers of yesteryear like Kuzmina and Domracheva is open to interpretation, but like with Clare Egan last year, the further we get from her active XC days, the less accurate they are as a comparison point for her current ability as a skier. If you remember, you were comparing Clare Egan's mediocre NCAA skiing records with her 2019-20 IBU World Cup skiing record to say that it was evidence of the low quality of skiing in biathlon - and yet, Clare had already been skiing at a very mediocre level in biathlon for three years at that point, and made a sudden and enormous improvement in her ski speed that season, such that her NCAA records ceased to be a viable data point for suggesting where her level as an XC skier would be in 2019-20.
It's not the Forsberg days anymore when a strong skier could miss 3 and still win easy, and while there aren't any of the biathletes that could legit challenge the best of the best in XC anymore (would that we could have seen Neuner or Domracheva at their peaks in the XC field). Miriam Gössner is a great example to point to here, because she perfectly fits the mould needed to test the "top XC skiers would win everything with 7/10" hypothesis that we've seen. Her career hit rate is 69%, and she has the best XC performances of a biathlete in recent memory, scoring 4th in the World Championships in Val di Fiemme, missing a medal by half a second. She scored 9 consecutive best course times in 2012-13, was in top 3 ski times in all but 4 races (one of which was 4th fastest) and only won 3 races all season to finish 9th in the World Cup. The depth of the women's field in biathlon (as biathletes, not as skiers, as we've seen a lot of the strongest skiers retire in recent seasons) is significantly better than that in cross-country right now where sure, the top names are going to crush the best biathletes, but once you get past the top 10-15 there's a huge and significant drop-off and you aren't going to convince me that, say, Markéta Davidová can't do any better than the Czechs in the women's XC World Cup right now. There are some decidedly mediocre skiers out there who could get a lower end top 20 in XC World Cups even when the Norwegians were competing, and remember that biathletes don't train classic and carry extra weight when skiing. Plus, don't discount the motivational factor that hitting targets and knowing you're in with a shout of winning a race can give you, compared to if you're just an anonymous face in a large pack being dropped by Therese Johaug and never seen by the camera again every distance race. The "shooting-biased" World Cup contenders are a step up in competitiveness skiing-wise than they were previously now, not such that they would be top XC competitors (remember, they're not trying to be), but such that the difference in pace between the likes of Eckhoff and Herrmann and that of the likes of Öberg and Wierer is markedly less than it was when Uschi Disl was competing.