>If lawsuits like this lead to more "straight honest" models, I could see even more people killing themselves when their therapist model says "Yeah, but you kind of actually do suck".

It is not one extreme or the other. o3 is nowhere near as sycophantic as 4o but it is also not going to tell you that you suck especially in a suicidal context. 4o was the mainstream model because OpenAI probably realised that this is what most people want rather than a more professional model like o3 (besides the fact that it also uses more compute).

The lawsuits probably did make them RLHF GPT-5 to be at least a bit more middle-ground though that led to backlash because people "missed" 4o due this type of behaviour so they made it bit more "friendly". Still not as bad as 4o.