I agree with a lot of what you've said, but I completely disagree that LLM's are no longer sycophantic. GPT-5 is definitely still very sycophantic, 'You're absolutely right!' still happens, etc. It's true it happens far less in a pure coding context (Claude Code / Codex) but I suspect only because of the system prompts, and those tools are by far in the minority of LLM usage.

I think it's enlightening to open up ChatGPT on the web with no custom instructions and just send a regular request and see the way it responds.