It's much more useful for parties if they can identify the barriers to potential voters. I don't know if GPEW has money to spend on internal polling, but it's one of the most valuable assets a party can have, especially if you can identify things the party can change.
I don't think I'll ever warm to Morgan McSweeney, but he might have been the last person in Labour to think that Labour had to appeal to the median voter.
If you want to understand what Reform is doing right now, a big part of that is leadership asking "how do we get from being a 28% party to a 35% party?" and their polling telling them a third of Tory voters are open to switching, and these are predominantly women and pensioners who are very alienated from the political class but also very risk-averse. So you hire Jenrick, who's built up a record as a Liz Truss disrespecter, and you get him to de-risk your economic platform by telling everyone he's looking for realistic savings instead of unfunded tax cuts.
Maybe it won't work, but aiming for that risk-averse female and pensioner vote is a big enough prize to be worth losing the jokers on X who like to share memes of Rupert Lowe as St George.
I don't know if GPEW has started polling in a serious way, or if they're just winging it based on their instincts and social media response. I suspect the latter - if the comparison with Farage holds, it's not with 2026 Reform, but with the enthusiastic amateur energy of 2014 Ukip.
There's also the possibility that potential voters' problems with GPEW is with things it can't easily fix. I suppose a Marmite leader can be overcome, but dealing with amateurism takes time, and I think more importantly, Omnicause politics is very popular with 15-20% of the electorate and very unpopular with everyone else.