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But if you look at the 2017-2021 seasons, I think you could point to the following races when Bottas outclassed Hamilton and beat him entirely on merit:
Sochi 2017
Red Bull Ring 2017
Abu Dhabi 2017
Sakhir 2018
Shanghai 2018
Montreal 2018
Sochi 2018
Melbourne 2019
Baku 2019
Suzuka 2019
COTA 2019
Red Bull Ring 2020
Abu Dhabi 2020
In 2021 there weren't really any examples, but that was certainly Bottas' worst season with Mercedes. But in those five years that is 13 races when Bottas was quite clearly the better Mercedes driver and there were plenty more when they were more evenly-matched.
Sergio Perez has been teammate to Max Verstappen for three seasons at Red Bull and I don't think there is a single example of a race when he was genuinely the better driver. Monaco 2022 is one possible example, although he needed to have that suspicious qualifying crash to start ahead of Verstappen, while Baku 2023 was also a possibility but they were actually very evenly-matched then. It is a far lower rate of beating his teammate than Bottas had.
If we look at qualifying head-to-heads, the score is Hamilton 69-31 Bottas at Mercedes. At Red Bull it is Verstappen 42-9 Perez. That is quite a striking difference, and only around half of Perez's wins were really on merit. I know that Bottas was more of a qualifier than Perez, who is better at tyre management (although while that was true in the Force India and Sauber days, we have never really seen it at Red Bull). Perez is also much better at racecraft.
But I think the statistics suggest that Valtteri Bottas was much closer to Lewis Hamilton's level than Sergio Perez is to Max Verstappen's. If you don't believe that is because of more preferential treatment at Red Bull than Mercedes, then either Bottas must be better than Perez, or Verstappen better than Hamilton, at least during their times in the respective aforementioned teams. Also, as I said before, from my own personal recollections, I remember never going into any weekend thinking it was a foregone conclusion that Hamilton would beat Bottas (apart from 2021), and not being totally shocked when Bottas got the upper hand. I even bet on him sometimes. But I have always felt extremely confident that Verstappen would beat Perez on any given weekend, and have very rarely been proven wrong.
Of course, both drivers were absolutely ideal number twos, and were not on the same level as their team leaders who are both all-time greats.
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