They just aren't good at agentic work.

Also risking it all for some distilled models is a recipe for disaster.

All of the smaller models from anyone are distilled from larger ones. I assume you are just trying to disparage the Chinese models, but what you are actually saying is that people should only be using the largest non-distilled models, not smaller ones like Sonnet. I assume the upcoming Opus 5 will be distilled from Fable 5.

GLM 5.2 is the first model that is competing with the frontier, everything before it existed I would totally agree with you.

I disagree, they are that good at agentic work.