Yes. This has been a bug bear of mine for many years. Lurid claims of comprehension in difficult environments, happy smiling people, being able to transition between different environments seamlessly, the ridiculous promotion of rechargeable hearing aids as a benefit never seen before, opaque comparisons of performance with a “competitor”, a hyperbolic increase in understanding compared to the previous generation. Yadda yadda yadda.
That said, I actually think the advertising in the last 5 to 10 years has toned down a bit. I think somebody threatened a law suit somewhere along the line and the website promotional material, particularly online, have made less claims. Sure, there were some recently, like the 150% improvement of the Resound Nexia and Phonak’s embarrassing claim of a waterproof aid, but on the whole I think there have been less. I may be wrong. I may just have become immune to it all.
What particularly annoys me is that they don’t identify cohorts. So they say, this aid achieves 30% more speech cues, or 15% more comprehension, but they don’t specify whether this is achieved in the mild-moderate, moderate-severe, severe-profound categories. If these figures are only applicable in the mild to moderate, for example, then it is misinformation and gives false hope.
Of course, there have been incremental improvements and some of these have been very good. Bluetooth, the reliability of aids in general, the discreetness due to power available in a smaller size. This is undeniable. But like you say, the issues with respect to speech in noise are still not quite solved, either because the chipsets are not powerful enough (I have read that they are custom chipsets and hence are not as powerful as general chipsets), or that there is still a way to go with the algorithms themselves.
