Yeah, that's classic false precision. 11,000 pounds has 2 significant figures, so if you convert, you can't pull all that extra precision out of your ass, you have to round to what the original measurement provided. Either 5000kg or 5 tonnes would be an acceptable conversion.

Of course Elmo probably has no idea how any of that works and isn't thinking past "metric = not murican = woke".

Not sure if it's really a sliding scale. We still call the era of art from 1850 to 1950 "modern".