Some say that the latest firmware made their battery time worse and some say it made it way better. The truths is probably that the firmware has nothing to do with your battery life. The only change we have made lately which we know consumes some power, is the camera retract when knocking on it feature. This is something you can turn off and check if it improves your battery life.
The more probabel explanation is what apps you have installed, how you're using your phone and so on. To compare each others SOT doesn't say much. You don't know how they are using their phone and some times people are not fully aware of how much they have used their own phone as we tend to forget how many times we looked at social media and so on.
If you want to compare your battery life with each other, then you need to test the same way. You could use the PCMark Work 2.0 battery life test or something else but you need to test the same way. You also need to agree on if you should compare at 0, 50 or 100% brightness.
