it seems that for this specific query Liquid Clustering has worse performance.  It does not have better performance for all queries.

The following are examples of scenarios that benefit from clustering:

• Tables often filtered by high cardinality columns.

• Tables with significant skew in data distribution.

• Tables that grow quickly and require maintenance and tuning effort.

• Tables with concurrent write requirements.

• Tables with access patterns that change over time.

• Tables where a typical partition key could leave the table with too many or too few partitions.