VSWR doesn't matter? But how about "mismatch loss"?

Close but no cigar. The (now often automatic) antenna tuner is used to transform the native impedance to the transmitter to match the conjugate transformed impedance of the antenna at the transmitter end of the transmission line. The effective result is that the incident energy arriving at the antenna "sees" a matched load and goes out to free space instead of bouncing off the transmission line to antenna interface. This is also why better antennas have reasonable (not far off matching impedance) characteristic impedances; they do not require matching networks physically placed at the antenna itself.

Now that is a "real" ham radio antenna system, screwampus but it provably works, and is repeatable (by others).

Heartily agreed.