Does that include those who put on a (perhaps excessively) dogmatic facade to avoid getting BLAMmed by Commissars, Inquisitors, overzealous Space Marines, Sisters of Battle, overzealous, conniving, and/or ambitious coworkers looking for an excuse to unseat them, etc. when their ideals might be (even incrementally) less dogmatic than the norm (for instance, disdaining the use of servo-skulls and servitors made from criminals as opposed to vat-grown ones, being willing to allow non-Forge Worlds and non-AdMech facilities to produce basic weapons (i.e. lasguns) and munitions (i.e. bolter rounds), etc.)?
Given the circumstances in which that sort of test is relevant, I think it’s mostly going to come down to people’s ability to remember who they’re talking to right now.
Y’know, I’ve opined before on the Empire’s general preference for long-ranged combat rather than the more traditional to the setting driving in close and hitting each other with your swords/flashlights/bolters/etc., for various reasons, but it occurs to me that the real advantage they have isn’t range.
Or superior technology (the Necrons have that).
Or the willingness to flood the battlefield with drones (the T’au have that).
It’s that most everyone else disdains the use of even human-level artificial intelligence, and that even in muddy ground engagements the Legions consider a good opening move to be “say hello to my hyperintelligent warmind advisor who considers four-dimensional go an amusing intellectual diversion for a lazy afternoon”.
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Yeah, the Empire would be one hell of a big fish, at least during 40k proper. ‘Nids would get out-swarmed or superweaponed, as would I believe most modern Orks. They dance circles around the IoM, and the Transcend can at least fight back against… probably anything short of all four of the Warp tumors putting their full strength into an all-out attack. Necrons… maybe if they wake all the way up and fully mobilize? Most of the other factions probably just don’t have enough OOOMPH to throw down with the Empire when they’re going all-out.
Edit: That being said, the Necrons at least potentially have tools/weapons that they can pull out to at least make it a lose-lose situation for everyone, if they’re inclined to go full scorched-earth on the whole galaxy. For example, making a souped-up franken-C’tan from the various shards they have to point at the Empire; that being said, that in particular is still solidly in the category of ‘I know I’m going to die, but I don’t care if I and everyone else die, so long as you die too.’
Edit 2: The Orks could also maybe pull off something, depending on how the evolution into Beasts and then even Krorks actually works in practice, and whether they are able to reach their WiH-era heights once more.
Edit 3: As for defunct factions which also would’ve had a shot at it, either the Eldar or Humanity at their respective peaks (before the pleasure cults really started eating away at the Dominion and during the DAoT, respectively) might have had a shot. The Eldar in particular, when they still had a functioning pantheon that was capable of acting directly in the Materium.
Oh, and the Old Ones and the C’Tan (during the War in Heaven) most likely could beat the Empire, as would the Necrons or the Krorks at their prime.
In the past, I’d opined that the real weakness of the Tyranids is that they share a common genetic code and biological substrate, which provides convenient places for bioweapons designers to hack the swarm.
(As a side note, this is also a problem for Orkoid life, which is where the public health guys adding eat-the-fungal-spores directives to the tasking of the Material Immunity is going to seriously impede their life cycle.)
But more important (since biologically divergent swarms are plausible) is that, of necessity, all Tyranid beasties share a common communications protocol.
What fun it will be when a dedicated axis submind manages to pwn the hive mind!
Fortunately, all of them have chronic backstabbing disorder aggravated by not being able to find rationality with a telescope on a nice clear night.
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Not just plausible, canonical. 
It’s not uncommon for splinters of the hive fleets to diverge significantly, and then come into conflict with other tentacles they encounter. Current in-setting speculation amongst the Magos Biologis is that the swarm considers this a good thing: they tend to skirmish in space and then the winner consumes the loser, preserving all the biomass and in theory becoming better adapted to the environment.
There’s also been some interesting in-setting speculation that the “hive queens” are the sapient minds and that they do cooperate with each other, instead of the entire tyrannid fleet being a singular ‘organism’. If this was the case, hacking the fleet may only yoink a portion of it.
Admittedly, that portion will be at LEAST “all the tyrannids within this solar system” and could be as high as a quarter of the nids in the galaxy, so that’s still a massive benefit and worth repeating as many times as pragmatic.
I think I phrased that badly. I wasn’t thinking of divergences between swarms, but rather within swarms: that is, swarms that function as an ecology, where different components of the swarm are genetically unrelated and cooperate through developed emergent behaviors, rather than being all relatives and “cooperating” through top-down command-and-control.
(It’s my understanding that the Tyranids are like the Zerg in this way - all the critters in the swarm share a common core genome, with different “modules” plugged into it/activated serving to differentiate one from another. In which case the core genome is the place to look to find common points of failure to attack.)
Between different hive fleets and even splinter fleets, of course, you’re absolutely right.
That’s also my understanding of the Nids, that they’re all built from the same basic DNA chunks.
But there’s also been some rather horrifying fluff in various codicii that eating Nids will still get you consumed, they have some flavor of mutagenic virus inside that will start to turn you into a Nid zombie. This is different from the Genestealer virus.