Obs4MIPs facilitates climate model evaluation, research, and development by technically aligning publicly available gridded observational products with results from the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP). This is accomplished via close coordination with the longstanding CMIP data standards and protocols that build on the more generic Climate-Forecast (CF) conventions. During the past year, efforts to advance obs4MIPs have been revitalized in parallel with preparations for the next phase of CMIP, with several new enhancements to obs4MIPs being well-suited to support climate model performance benchmarking. First, version control of obs4MIPs compliant datasets are now maintained on GitHub (GH) in a way that unifies the description of all products while simultaneously adhering to the product identification defined by individual data curators. Second, all codes and metadata used to produce obs4MIPs-compliant products are maintained on the GH repository, providing transparency for how each dataset was prepared. While in many cases compliance is achieved by simply augmenting metadata and coordinate descriptions, increasingly the reported data itself might differ from the original source dataset, e.g., a product that has been mapped to a different spatial resolution. Documentation of how these changes are made can facilitate a more transparent model assessment process and systematic performance benchmarking. Many of these obs4MIPs compliant products are being published on the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) alongside CMIP data, making them readily available for the research community. In this presentation we highlight the progress and plans of obs4MIPs, and how it will support the performance benchmarking of Earth System Models.