People crap on Dragon Ball power levels by saying they make no sense and are wildly inconsistent, without realizing that that’s literally the point Toriyama was making.
There are multiple moments in Z where someone sees a character’s power level and thinks they’ve got the fight down pat, only to get demolished.
I mean, you would think the fact that the villains were always the ones using power levels because of their resistance to learning new things would tip people off to the fact that the whole power level idea was meant to be stupid