Absolute timings in nanoseconds yes, and that's secondary to FCLK.
His problem IIRC is that Corsair Vengeance 3200 is garbage-tier quality that most motherboards struggle to memory train much faster than CL18. So 3800 CL22 is just as fast, with a 300MHz FCLK boost which is huge.
Getting Corsair Vengeance stable at even 3200 CL16 with manual timing override is hard on some boards, because it's the cheapest RAM you can buy in the UK for a reason. The quantity of it I've RMA'd because it's faulty at JEDEC 2133 timings is disgraceful and I refuse to buy Corsair RAM now, based solely on a few dozen kits of Vengance LPX. Never has any other brand failed so much and so hard.
Just to be clear: you forgot "LPX" a lot in there. The Regular corsair vengeance stuff was often single rank and/or even timings, and had no issues.
The reason corsair LPX was a problem back then was a combination of dual rank 8GB sticks, and the even timings which AMD would gear-down to even latencies awkwardly, which could throw the below chart a little off if the RAM didn't like the change
Zen 1 was officially rated to 2400Mhz with four ranks
Because the RAM was cheap a lot of people slapped in four of them, and wondered why it didn't run at 2667+
(Intel got around this by just locking users to 2133 and 2400 on 6th and 7th gen, AMD tried let you overclock but forgot how non-tech savvy users are)
Look how far ryzen has come. 2400Mhz to 4000Mhz, technically possible on the same motherboard (x370)
