Like I said, that's immaterial. This is a statewide average. This month was hotter even with the raw and unadjusted data. The mean of 105 stations was 78.94F, versus a mean of 78.83F in 1934. And that was with a lot fewer stations (50) which were more biased towards warmer, low-elevation and city sites. The 1934 data is also biased up a bit due to the observation time being 5 or 6 pm in the afternoon for cooperative observers, versus 7 am today. Even ignoring that, it was still hotter last month.
1901 was actually closer, with an unweighted mean of 78.86F, but that was the average of just 42 stations heavily biased towards the Coastal Plain. The gridded values from NCEI look very reasonable, with all of those years among the hottest and 2012, 2020 & 2025 being basically tied.
But you are correct to say it "squeaked by" as it was indeed a 3-way tie, not a new outright record, and there are several other years within a degree or so. Pretty typical at a state level... it's rare to beat prior records by more than a few tenths of a degree particularly in the summer. An individual site sometimes beats an old record by 1+F but very rarely in the state averages, and never in the summer when variability is at a relative minimum.