Not really, they said "some of this a perceived quality drop". That's almost certainly correct, that _some_ of it is that.

When everyone's talking about the real degradation, you'll also get everyone who experiences "random"[1] degradation thinking they're experiencing the same thing, and chiming in as well.

[1] I also don't think we're talking the more technical type of nondeterminism here, temperature etc, but the nondeterminism where I can't really determine when I have a good context and when I don't, and in some cases can't tell why an LLM is capable of one thing but not another. And so when I switch tasks that I think are equally easy and it fails on the new one, or when my context has some meaningless-to-me (random-to-me) variation that causes it to fail instead of succeed, I can't determine the cause. And so I bucket myself with the crowd that's experiencing real degradation and chime in.