I'm not sure how the benchmarks would actually be, I'm speaking more from my understanding of other people's explanations of how they work (probably wrong).

• \[.*?\] - starting at the first [ look at up all sizes of .*? from the longest to the shortest, then for which ones are followed by a ], choose the shortest one.
• \[[^\]]*\] - starting at the first [ search through all possible [^\]]* from shortest to longest, until we find an ], at that point choose the previous one.

Or something like that. I think I find the second logic to make more sense to me.

Update: and the other point is I'm suggesting avoiding the habit of overusing the dot, which can cause problems such as were addressed in the thread I linked.