Coke isn’t even consistent between factories, different bottle sizes and cans.

That's my experience but I'm not much of a Coke drinker.

I recall some years ago Pepsi making the claim they could replicate Coke to the point of it being essentially indistinguishable but that's wasn't the point, their branding required Pepsi to be clearly differentiated from Coke—commercially that seems to make sense.

It's unclear how accurate Pepsi's claims are but they seemed to be based on tasting trials where people couldn't tell the 'clone' from the real thing.

Seems to me Pepsi was likely right, if we consider how close this formulation is to Coke and that it was produced with limited resources then one would expect Pepsi with its huge resources to grind their 'clone' as fine as they deemed necessary.

These days, Coke's 'secret' formula is more a publicity stunt than anything else.

Never liked the 20oz plastic Coke bottles. The aluminum cans and 2liter plastic tasted fine though.

It is true: sweetness is very different across the globe due to nation preferences