> SHA-3 did introduce something useful To me the most useful part of SHA-3 is that you don't need to use HMAC as it is not vulnerable to length extension attacks. Meaning that it's much faster than SHA-2 when used as a MAC construction.
That's a good point, but the truncated SHA-2 variants (512/224 and 512/256) are also not susceptible to length extension, and are faster than SHA-3. BLAKE2 was a SHA-3 finalist, and thus by definition isn't vulnerable to length extension either.
Any link to some reference document on this topic?