I feel this way about gpt-5-nano (EOL December 2026). It seems like the open weight models have progressed a long way since these old models were released though. Deepseek V4 Flash is even cheaper than gpt-5-nano. I'm still going to pay a cloud provider to run it for me, I'm not local inference pilled yet, but I _can_ run it myself in the future if worse comes to worst.

Objectively testable evals are one thing, but how does one judge whether a new model is adequately reproducing the subjective "writing style" of an old model that you've gotten accustomed to the feel of?