Another interesting fact.
Every single fight he has been in since his fight against Shogun in 2011 has been a title fight (or interim)
Imagine all these hungry top contenders wanting to fight for the belt, having all Jones' available tapes to study etc
This is truly why Jon is the GOAT and hasn't had all these later losses unlike the others.
Everybody else makes the mistake of fighting how they always have so the inevitably get caught / have a tougher time. There's just too much tape available and slower reflexes just make it all the more likely they're opponent will land the sequences they've drilled for. Anderson, GSP, Fedor, Aldo, Cruz, etc., they all try and fight how their prime selves did and it costs them.
Jon's the only guy who's switched things up and adapted as his career's progressed to stay on top. It's why the Gane fight was so dominant. It's not that Gane isn't a bad grappler; it's that Jon acknowledged that at his age, his last kickboxing heavy fights that were close, time off, HW power he's never felt, HW built he's never fought at before, etc., he should focus on being a dominant grappler to avoid it all as much as possibly entirely. Brilliant adaption that others would and have stubbornly ignored.
That said, I'd probably put DJ as the combat GOAT, even if I have Jon ahead as the MMA GOAT. DJ is a close 2nd, but just has too many losses to be MMA GOAT over Jon. The reason why I'd give him a more broader combat GOAT though is cause he's 6-1 now over in ONE where the rules are different. His 1 loss to Moraes was specifically due to ONE's different rules allowing grounded knees and shows he hadn't fully adjusted to them at the time (and he'd still already won a GP before that). What does he do? Comes back and pays Moraes back in kind with a knee KO of his own, and then wins the trilogy on top of it. All at BW, not FLW. Then on top of that he goes and has a mixed MT/MMA fight with the P4P #1 MT fighter in the world and wins, and then goes and wins gold at IBJJF in 2023 too.
MM overall is ridiculous at combat. I just can't give him specifically MMA over Jon as Jon does have the better career there.