A stylesheet on another origin costs a DNS lookup, a TCP handshake and a TLS negotiation before the first byte, all of it blocking render. A preconnect hint overlaps that with HTML parsing.
Impact is importance multiplied by the confidence tier’s weight — SPECIFICATION 1.0, RESEARCH 0.7, EMERGING 0.3, EXPERIMENTAL 0.1. Two rules backed by the same class of evidence therefore always carry the same weight, which is what makes the score reproducible rather than hand-tuned.