Oh Opus is nerfed sure, but not that hard. Early this year opus 4.6 can understand your prompt and your intention easily, it got worse around mid April. Opus 4.7 even worse than that.

However that's just it, you just need to improve and make clearer of your prompt and it will perform just as good.

Or just switch over to OpenAI. Codex-5.5 is quite good.