Nvm it's still ain't applying, only speed level up to 4 works, both stack (any level, weirdly) and infinite speed aren't working (Seem like I was stuck at 60% despite being lvl 13).
I took a look at transport_technologies.lua and I think there's some issue with the infinite tech calculation? technology.level behaves weirdly from my limited testing (It seems to be off by 1 for infinite techs?), maybe a full recompute on research_finished with data directly derived from force.technologies may fix it, not sure if pairs iteration & the substring matching is an issue too since pairs iteration isn't deterministic.
I'm not too knowledgeable about factorio modding specificity tho, also really bad at reading other people's code but I think there's something in there randomly messing with the technologies (´・ω・`)?