I guess I just don't know how to square that with my actual experiences then.

I've seen sporadic drops in reasoning skills that made me feel like it was January 2025, not 2026 ... inconsistent.

LLMs sample the next token from a conditional probability distribution, the hope is that dumb sequences are less probable but they will just happen naturally.

I wouldn't doubt that these companies would deliberately degrade performance to manage load, but it's also true that humans are notoriously terrible at identifying random distributions, even with something as simple as a coin flip. It's very possible that what you view as degradation is just "bad RNG".